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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Brushstroke Still Life with Lamp belongs to a series of still life prints that Lichtenstein completed in 1997. The idea of an "obliterating brush stroke" came to the artist in a dream; a brush stroke that washed over the surface of an image, defacing or effacing it.
It is the artist's hand, or the idea of the artist's hand, that is of interest here. Lichtenstein's brushstrokes have a disctinctive history, dating from about 1965-1966, when they seemed to parody the idea of the subconscious expression of ideas through the artist's hand so central to Abstract Expressionism. These brushstrokes were made with calculation and care by mechanical means, the very mechanical methods and aids he employed proposing the antithesis of all romantic ideas attached to the artist's gesture and stroke. But whereas Lichtenstein's pre-Pop early paintings speak of his aesthetic polarities, one eye towards Europe and Picasso, the other cast on native grounds of the Abstract Expressionists and their emotionally weighted look, this mature and archetypal image painted at the end of his career readdresses two of the main motifs that remained present: the still life and interior elements that he developed throughout his work from the 1970s onward, and the obliterating brushstroke of his earlier days and a trademark of the Pop era.
Brushstroke Still Life with Lamp belongs to a series of still life prints that Lichtenstein completed in 1997. The idea of an "obliterating brush stroke" came to the artist in a dream; a brush stroke that washed over the surface of an image, defacing or effacing it.
It is the artist's hand, or the idea of the artist's hand, that is of interest here. Lichtenstein's brushstrokes have a disctinctive history, dating from about 1965-1966, when they seemed to parody the idea of the subconscious expression of ideas through the artist's hand so central to Abstract Expressionism. These brushstrokes were made with calculation and care by mechanical means, the very mechanical methods and aids he employed proposing the antithesis of all romantic ideas attached to the artist's gesture and stroke. But whereas Lichtenstein's pre-Pop early paintings speak of his aesthetic polarities, one eye towards Europe and Picasso, the other cast on native grounds of the Abstract Expressionists and their emotionally weighted look, this mature and archetypal image painted at the end of his career readdresses two of the main motifs that remained present: the still life and interior elements that he developed throughout his work from the 1970s onward, and the obliterating brushstroke of his earlier days and a trademark of the Pop era.