Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
In 1972, Roy Lichtenstein began his Still Life series of paintings, turning his Pop focus on this ancient genre of art. Painted that year, Two Apples perfectly encapsulates the dramatic and dynamic tension that comes from this confrontation between the old and the new, between so-called "High Art" and the highly-evolved short-hand used in advertising. Here, the common association of the still life with the memento mori has been banished, replaced by a crisp vitality that speaks only of life, and of the apples' delicious taste.
In a sense, Two Apples is a contemporary update of the legend of Zeuxis, the ancient Greek painter whose images of fruit were so lifelike that birds flew down to try to eat them. So too, Lichtenstein has created this picture by tapping into a modern visual language which results in a depiction of apples that is so crisp and perfect that, to our ad-savvy eye, it becomes desirable. And yet these apples have been presented in a manner that is so explicitly, overtly and knowingly artificial - with black outlines for the shape of the fruit, white voids for the reflection in their perfect, shiny skin and dots and monochrome to represent the colored wall and table respectively - that while "reading" the picture, we certainly know that we cannot reach out and touch them.
It was this phenomenological gap that Lichtenstein explores in his paintings, taking the visual appearance of industrial print industry and rendering it through traditional media, with paint, brush and canvas. He has boiled the image of these luscious apples, the fruit so often associated with the temptations of knowledge and its pitfalls, down to an absurdly minimal group of forms: dots, lines and blocks of color. Lichtenstein was fascinated by the gradual development of a visual iconography in comics and advertising and saw it as a modern parallel to the development of "classical form." These apples represent an almost Platonic ideal, the perfect invocation of apple-ness for our consumer age. But as he explained, today, "It's not called classical, it's called a cliché. Well, I'm interested in my work's redeveloping these classical ways, except that it's not classical, it's like a cartoon" (Lichtenstein, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, pp. 226-27). By invoking this cartoon classicism, Lichtenstein has ripped away the suspension of disbelief, that reflex interpretation that these apples cannot help but conjure up in the viewer. As he explained, "My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world" (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coward ed., Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, p. 52).
In 1972, Roy Lichtenstein began his Still Life series of paintings, turning his Pop focus on this ancient genre of art. Painted that year, Two Apples perfectly encapsulates the dramatic and dynamic tension that comes from this confrontation between the old and the new, between so-called "High Art" and the highly-evolved short-hand used in advertising. Here, the common association of the still life with the memento mori has been banished, replaced by a crisp vitality that speaks only of life, and of the apples' delicious taste.
In a sense, Two Apples is a contemporary update of the legend of Zeuxis, the ancient Greek painter whose images of fruit were so lifelike that birds flew down to try to eat them. So too, Lichtenstein has created this picture by tapping into a modern visual language which results in a depiction of apples that is so crisp and perfect that, to our ad-savvy eye, it becomes desirable. And yet these apples have been presented in a manner that is so explicitly, overtly and knowingly artificial - with black outlines for the shape of the fruit, white voids for the reflection in their perfect, shiny skin and dots and monochrome to represent the colored wall and table respectively - that while "reading" the picture, we certainly know that we cannot reach out and touch them.
It was this phenomenological gap that Lichtenstein explores in his paintings, taking the visual appearance of industrial print industry and rendering it through traditional media, with paint, brush and canvas. He has boiled the image of these luscious apples, the fruit so often associated with the temptations of knowledge and its pitfalls, down to an absurdly minimal group of forms: dots, lines and blocks of color. Lichtenstein was fascinated by the gradual development of a visual iconography in comics and advertising and saw it as a modern parallel to the development of "classical form." These apples represent an almost Platonic ideal, the perfect invocation of apple-ness for our consumer age. But as he explained, today, "It's not called classical, it's called a cliché. Well, I'm interested in my work's redeveloping these classical ways, except that it's not classical, it's like a cartoon" (Lichtenstein, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, pp. 226-27). By invoking this cartoon classicism, Lichtenstein has ripped away the suspension of disbelief, that reflex interpretation that these apples cannot help but conjure up in the viewer. As he explained, "My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world" (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coward ed., Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, p. 52).