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Lot Essay
While serving as an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1989, Roy Lichtenstein came across a billboard furniture advertisement that would inspire Collage for Modern Room. Meant to capture the barren feeling of homes featured in commercial pop culture, the collage captures an idealized conception of bourgeois uniformity. Based off advertisements cut from the local Yellow Pages, this collage, among others in Lichtenstein’s Interior series, ironically converts mass-produced emotions and material objects into sophisticated references that highlight his niche within the larger Pop movement.
Measuring almost four feet across, Collage for Modern Room is completed in an oversized format that recalls its origins as a billboard-inspired work. The sharp, punching graphics are exemplary of Lichtenstein’s Pop vernacular. The artist integrates the ready-made quality of screen prints with more painterly gestures of thick lines, flat surface planes, and an obscured perspective. With a color palate reduced to primary colors and linear elements that emphasize the spatiality of Lichtenstein’s scene, the collage is lacking a human presence that is noted across all of Lichtenstein’s Interiors series. Collage for Modern Room depicts a pristine, almost sterile environment devoid of people, advertisements, and media. The furniture represented is generic, and the rendering is unreal and illustrational. In doing so, the artist exposes an underlying alienation sometimes experienced in conventional contemporary life, commenting on the predictability and homogeny among idealized American homes.
Collage for Modern Room also features the quintessential Ben-Day dot pattern of the Pop movement. Lichtenstein first started using this trademark pattern in 1961, and it quickly became one of the most recognizable motifs in 20th century art history. While the dots conjure associations of the color and tone found in glossy print of magazines, they also serve to reinforce the graphic medium through which Lichtenstein operates: “Ben-day dots and diagonal shading stripes are technical printing devices that in commercial art are meant to go unnoticed. Lichtenstein has blown them up to such a scale that they read not just as information but as interference, as static” (R. Kalina, p. 82). The Ben-Day dots give viewers a lens through which to view the contemporary home, emphasizing the commerciality of the artist’s ideology.
The depth of pop culture reference in Collage for Modern Room is also evidenced by the yellow portrait hanging in the living room’s corner. Fellow Pop artist, Andy Warhol, iconized the image of Mao Zedong in the 1970s through a series of silkscreen portraits that are now exhibited throughout the world. While many of Lichtenstein’s work take on a self-referential nature, the inclusion of the portrait in this particular work is a nod towards the appropriation classic not only of the artist’s oeuvre but also of the Pop movement as a whole.
Collage for Modern Room is part of Lichtenstein’s Interiors series, one of the last major series produced before his death. Completed in the early 1990s when the artist was in his late sixties, the collage represents a culmination of Lichtenstein’s method of appropriating images from popular media. The collage exemplifies Lichtenstein’s process, illustrating how the artist mixes high and low art with punches of color and stronger graphic detail to develop his vision. Leo Castelli commented on Lichtenstein's Interiors: "What I see when I stand in front of any interior of Roy's is a work of an important artist that I immediately recognize: a Calder, a blue sponge sculpture by Yves Klein, a Lichtenstein, a Johns from the late eighties. But if you eliminate these works from the interiors they become unreal. They are too perfect. The environment is too clean to be habitable" (L. Castelli quoted in Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors, ex. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, p. 23).
Pop art sought to push against the rise of Abstract Expressionism that permeated the art of the 1950s. By incorporating images from pop culture into their art, Pop artists sought to investigate the myth of blissful bourgeois domesticity. A work that integrates images of a living room with advertisements of idealized middle class life, Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956 (in the collection of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in Germany) is widely considered a seminal work of the Pop movement. Just as Hamilton highlights the sense of commerciality and artificiality that saturates the idea of an idyllic home, Lichtenstein’s Collage for Modern Room exposes the false consumerist notion that the accumulation of material goods engenders happiness.
Through Collage for Modern Room, Lichtenstein manipulates bold colors and strong geometrics to achieve a harmonious yet muscular balance. It is an intimate look into the domestic spaces of everyday life in middle class America, revealing an underlying sense of detachment and materiality. Lichtenstein’s work emphasizes the divide between fine art and design, reflecting the commerciality that permeates his oeuvre and the Pop art genre.
Measuring almost four feet across, Collage for Modern Room is completed in an oversized format that recalls its origins as a billboard-inspired work. The sharp, punching graphics are exemplary of Lichtenstein’s Pop vernacular. The artist integrates the ready-made quality of screen prints with more painterly gestures of thick lines, flat surface planes, and an obscured perspective. With a color palate reduced to primary colors and linear elements that emphasize the spatiality of Lichtenstein’s scene, the collage is lacking a human presence that is noted across all of Lichtenstein’s Interiors series. Collage for Modern Room depicts a pristine, almost sterile environment devoid of people, advertisements, and media. The furniture represented is generic, and the rendering is unreal and illustrational. In doing so, the artist exposes an underlying alienation sometimes experienced in conventional contemporary life, commenting on the predictability and homogeny among idealized American homes.
Collage for Modern Room also features the quintessential Ben-Day dot pattern of the Pop movement. Lichtenstein first started using this trademark pattern in 1961, and it quickly became one of the most recognizable motifs in 20th century art history. While the dots conjure associations of the color and tone found in glossy print of magazines, they also serve to reinforce the graphic medium through which Lichtenstein operates: “Ben-day dots and diagonal shading stripes are technical printing devices that in commercial art are meant to go unnoticed. Lichtenstein has blown them up to such a scale that they read not just as information but as interference, as static” (R. Kalina, p. 82). The Ben-Day dots give viewers a lens through which to view the contemporary home, emphasizing the commerciality of the artist’s ideology.
The depth of pop culture reference in Collage for Modern Room is also evidenced by the yellow portrait hanging in the living room’s corner. Fellow Pop artist, Andy Warhol, iconized the image of Mao Zedong in the 1970s through a series of silkscreen portraits that are now exhibited throughout the world. While many of Lichtenstein’s work take on a self-referential nature, the inclusion of the portrait in this particular work is a nod towards the appropriation classic not only of the artist’s oeuvre but also of the Pop movement as a whole.
Collage for Modern Room is part of Lichtenstein’s Interiors series, one of the last major series produced before his death. Completed in the early 1990s when the artist was in his late sixties, the collage represents a culmination of Lichtenstein’s method of appropriating images from popular media. The collage exemplifies Lichtenstein’s process, illustrating how the artist mixes high and low art with punches of color and stronger graphic detail to develop his vision. Leo Castelli commented on Lichtenstein's Interiors: "What I see when I stand in front of any interior of Roy's is a work of an important artist that I immediately recognize: a Calder, a blue sponge sculpture by Yves Klein, a Lichtenstein, a Johns from the late eighties. But if you eliminate these works from the interiors they become unreal. They are too perfect. The environment is too clean to be habitable" (L. Castelli quoted in Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors, ex. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, p. 23).
Pop art sought to push against the rise of Abstract Expressionism that permeated the art of the 1950s. By incorporating images from pop culture into their art, Pop artists sought to investigate the myth of blissful bourgeois domesticity. A work that integrates images of a living room with advertisements of idealized middle class life, Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956 (in the collection of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in Germany) is widely considered a seminal work of the Pop movement. Just as Hamilton highlights the sense of commerciality and artificiality that saturates the idea of an idyllic home, Lichtenstein’s Collage for Modern Room exposes the false consumerist notion that the accumulation of material goods engenders happiness.
Through Collage for Modern Room, Lichtenstein manipulates bold colors and strong geometrics to achieve a harmonious yet muscular balance. It is an intimate look into the domestic spaces of everyday life in middle class America, revealing an underlying sense of detachment and materiality. Lichtenstein’s work emphasizes the divide between fine art and design, reflecting the commerciality that permeates his oeuvre and the Pop art genre.