.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work will appear in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Mastering an ambitious array of subjects, from portraits to landscapes, and still lifes, in his signature style through various mediums, Roy Lichtenstein’s work is indebted to our perception of art—both high and low. As was central to Pop Art’s mandate, Lichtenstein cultivated images from mass media, yet he maintained a fascination with the history of art as a subject for which to advance Pop ideas in an historical context. Not dissimilar to Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian—all whose imagery Lichtenstein appropriated and transformed into his own—Lichtenstein grew a vast interest in how we see and organize our perceptions.
An important example from a small early series of twelve paintings, Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame, from 1973 is a rare example of a torn canvas from Lichtenstein’s Stretcher series. Direct and forceful, the image is arresting with its elegance and simplicity. Like his Brushstrokes and Mirrors the stretcher frames examine illusion and reduction. “These paintings are flat and frontal, deceptive and undeceptive simultaneously,” described critic Lawrence Alloway. “The illusion depends on the identity of format and subject in the stretcher frames, but the unyielding contours and emphatic black and yellow dots draw attention to the objectness of the work itself” (L. Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1983, p. 64).
Masterfully balancing along the line between being serious or witty, Lichtenstein engages the viewer with his modern rendering of trompe l’oeil. Here, the painted surface, presents a double allusion of the back of the canvas—the first, a wrapped stretcher being torn away to reveal the bare wooden structure underneath. In Stretcher Frame Revealed beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame, the front of the painting is a portrayal of the layers obstructed by the canvas. In Lichtenstein’s updated and “Popified” variation on the classic technique of fooling the eye, we are not fooled at all. Instead, the artist has gone further in his investigation of the object, resulting in a stretcher that has become slightly abstracted. Lichtenstein’s signature use of Benday dots and tri-color format blurs the line between abstraction and reality. By varying the size and color of the dots, Lichtenstein simulates the play of light pictorially within the borders of the picture.
The viewer is, in essence, tricked into believing that what they are looking at is the actual object in question. This method, which dates from antiquity, highly influenced movements such as Dadaism, Cubism and Pop, which constantly question the relationship between reality and representation. The image provokes the Surrealist notion of polar, co-existing realities: this painting is not a painting but its back. René Magritte, a master of “fooling the eye,” played with this idea in his famous painting La Trahison des images—the viewer is clearly aware that they are looking at a painting of a pipe, but the artist insists on painting the words “this is not a pipe” directly on the canvas. Lichtenstein uses his own signature style of painting to engage the viewer in this push-pull relationship of reality and illusion. He was highly influenced by artists such as Magritte and Marcel Duchamp, the champion of the “ready-made,” who both cleverly played with the viewer’s ideas of what made art—art.
John Coplans comments that, “The banality of the objects themselves and their very anonymity is married to a rigorous sense of abstraction—a new architecture of boldness and clarity defined by the starkness and simplicity of the parts” (J. Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 21). Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame sees the artist drawing upon techniques founded early in his career, but includes a playful sensibility that comes with years of experience. Its “mechanical” Benday-dot rendering and cool calculation subvert the brooding emotional signature painting of the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists. In the spirit of Pop Art’s penchant for found objects, Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame is—with a wink—true to size. Its self-deprecating humor is derived from Pop Art’s fresh view of high versus low art, and its criteria for a legitimate subject. Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame has a keen sense of composure and a distilled strength and beauty that reflects the artist’s intellect, wit, and intuition for finding balance between and composition and concept.
Mastering an ambitious array of subjects, from portraits to landscapes, and still lifes, in his signature style through various mediums, Roy Lichtenstein’s work is indebted to our perception of art—both high and low. As was central to Pop Art’s mandate, Lichtenstein cultivated images from mass media, yet he maintained a fascination with the history of art as a subject for which to advance Pop ideas in an historical context. Not dissimilar to Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian—all whose imagery Lichtenstein appropriated and transformed into his own—Lichtenstein grew a vast interest in how we see and organize our perceptions.
An important example from a small early series of twelve paintings, Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame, from 1973 is a rare example of a torn canvas from Lichtenstein’s Stretcher series. Direct and forceful, the image is arresting with its elegance and simplicity. Like his Brushstrokes and Mirrors the stretcher frames examine illusion and reduction. “These paintings are flat and frontal, deceptive and undeceptive simultaneously,” described critic Lawrence Alloway. “The illusion depends on the identity of format and subject in the stretcher frames, but the unyielding contours and emphatic black and yellow dots draw attention to the objectness of the work itself” (L. Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1983, p. 64).
Masterfully balancing along the line between being serious or witty, Lichtenstein engages the viewer with his modern rendering of trompe l’oeil. Here, the painted surface, presents a double allusion of the back of the canvas—the first, a wrapped stretcher being torn away to reveal the bare wooden structure underneath. In Stretcher Frame Revealed beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame, the front of the painting is a portrayal of the layers obstructed by the canvas. In Lichtenstein’s updated and “Popified” variation on the classic technique of fooling the eye, we are not fooled at all. Instead, the artist has gone further in his investigation of the object, resulting in a stretcher that has become slightly abstracted. Lichtenstein’s signature use of Benday dots and tri-color format blurs the line between abstraction and reality. By varying the size and color of the dots, Lichtenstein simulates the play of light pictorially within the borders of the picture.
The viewer is, in essence, tricked into believing that what they are looking at is the actual object in question. This method, which dates from antiquity, highly influenced movements such as Dadaism, Cubism and Pop, which constantly question the relationship between reality and representation. The image provokes the Surrealist notion of polar, co-existing realities: this painting is not a painting but its back. René Magritte, a master of “fooling the eye,” played with this idea in his famous painting La Trahison des images—the viewer is clearly aware that they are looking at a painting of a pipe, but the artist insists on painting the words “this is not a pipe” directly on the canvas. Lichtenstein uses his own signature style of painting to engage the viewer in this push-pull relationship of reality and illusion. He was highly influenced by artists such as Magritte and Marcel Duchamp, the champion of the “ready-made,” who both cleverly played with the viewer’s ideas of what made art—art.
John Coplans comments that, “The banality of the objects themselves and their very anonymity is married to a rigorous sense of abstraction—a new architecture of boldness and clarity defined by the starkness and simplicity of the parts” (J. Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 21). Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame sees the artist drawing upon techniques founded early in his career, but includes a playful sensibility that comes with years of experience. Its “mechanical” Benday-dot rendering and cool calculation subvert the brooding emotional signature painting of the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists. In the spirit of Pop Art’s penchant for found objects, Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame is—with a wink—true to size. Its self-deprecating humor is derived from Pop Art’s fresh view of high versus low art, and its criteria for a legitimate subject. Stretcher Frame Revealed Beneath Painting of a Stretcher Frame has a keen sense of composure and a distilled strength and beauty that reflects the artist’s intellect, wit, and intuition for finding balance between and composition and concept.