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Lot Essay
It is an attempt to classicise a romantic notion…When I use it in a painting, it is to express the conflict of quasi-expressionistic technique and commercial motif…I am thrilled about the idea of Brushstrokes made of false Brushstrokes. I’m impressed by how artificial things can look. I try to be as stylised as I can get away with. (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in: Gianni Mercurio, Roy Lichtenstein – Meditations on Art, La Triennale di Milano, 2010, p. 221)
The composition for View from the Window is loosely based on Max Beckmann’s painting Evening on the Terrace (Collection Richard L. Feigen, New York), a view of the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen painted in 1928. Lichtenstein’s large format mixed-media print belongs to a series called Landscapes, begun in 1984, in which the artist revisited landscape paintings by modern masters, rendering them in his signature cartoon-like brushstrokes. His homage is full of whimsy and humour. Whilst Beckmann’s view is dark and brooding, Lichtenstein’s treatment evokes the sunny Mediterranean of Matisse and the Fauves, an art historical quip and playful subversion of the Expressionist’s original intent. This effect is achieved with a much wider range of colours than in his earlier prints, with pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows and metallic silver, supplementing his staple palette of primary colours.
Riva Castleman notes that in his Landscapes Lichtenstein departs from the isolated ‘abstract’ brushstroke of his earlier oeuvre, and instead employs the strokes to define a scene, an open window with a bunch of flowers, looking onto a view of sea and sky, with the sail of a boat in the distance. ‘However much it may be presumed that the artist now conveys depth and atmosphere where he always distinguished his work as flat and made with marks that emphasised and maintained that flatness’, Castleman continues, `his methods remain the same, but demonstrate that even compositions that presume to give the impression of near and far are still marks on a flat surface. The marks that make the boat are little different from those that make the frame of the window or the adjacent water…the Landscapes accentuate the preposterous conventions of picture-making itself’. (Riva Castleman, Seven Master Print-Makers – Innovations in the Eighties, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exh. cat. 1991, p. 92).
The composition for View from the Window is loosely based on Max Beckmann’s painting Evening on the Terrace (Collection Richard L. Feigen, New York), a view of the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen painted in 1928. Lichtenstein’s large format mixed-media print belongs to a series called Landscapes, begun in 1984, in which the artist revisited landscape paintings by modern masters, rendering them in his signature cartoon-like brushstrokes. His homage is full of whimsy and humour. Whilst Beckmann’s view is dark and brooding, Lichtenstein’s treatment evokes the sunny Mediterranean of Matisse and the Fauves, an art historical quip and playful subversion of the Expressionist’s original intent. This effect is achieved with a much wider range of colours than in his earlier prints, with pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows and metallic silver, supplementing his staple palette of primary colours.
Riva Castleman notes that in his Landscapes Lichtenstein departs from the isolated ‘abstract’ brushstroke of his earlier oeuvre, and instead employs the strokes to define a scene, an open window with a bunch of flowers, looking onto a view of sea and sky, with the sail of a boat in the distance. ‘However much it may be presumed that the artist now conveys depth and atmosphere where he always distinguished his work as flat and made with marks that emphasised and maintained that flatness’, Castleman continues, `his methods remain the same, but demonstrate that even compositions that presume to give the impression of near and far are still marks on a flat surface. The marks that make the boat are little different from those that make the frame of the window or the adjacent water…the Landscapes accentuate the preposterous conventions of picture-making itself’. (Riva Castleman, Seven Master Print-Makers – Innovations in the Eighties, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, exh. cat. 1991, p. 92).