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Lot Essay
Included in the artist’s 1998 retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, as well as in the major show ‘Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors’ at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art the following year, Pitcher Triptych (1972) exemplifies the bold perceptual and art-historical play that preoccupied Roy Lichtenstein throughout his Pop career. In the left-hand panel, the titular pitcher appears in crisp, graphic black-and-white upon a yellow floor, against a blue backdrop of Lichtenstein’s signature Ben-Day dots. In the second, this still life is fractured in Cubist mode through an array of diagonal planes. In the final panel, it is riven into abstraction: outline, volume, shadow and light are reduced to simple, flat sections of colour, the negative space of the pitcher’s handle a perfect circle. The work’s episodic format looks back to Lichtenstein’s comic-strip-based paintings of the 1960s, while also parodying the Modernist idea of artistic progress as a journey from figuration to pure abstraction.
For Lichtenstein, all modes of art-making were subject to obsolescence, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to Pop itself; as early as 1965, he said that ‘no one can become a Pop artist now’ (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. Glueck, ‘Warhol’s Pad is Scene of Blast Launching “Pop Art”, New Book’, New York Times, 30 June 1965, p. 43). Typical of his complex, analytical approach, Pitcher Triptych is less a representation of an object than an exploration of painterly styles and signals. As Jack Cowart has noted, the ‘going-abstract’ sequence of this work creates ‘a wonderful perceptual joke. In truth the initial image is, in reference to virtual reality, no less abstract than the nominally abstract image depicted at the end. It is the same reality except for the difference of stylistic nomenclatures. The artist loads the story to confuse, amuse and upset our present hierarchies’ (J. Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980, exh. cat. Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri 1981, p. 64). Lichtenstein underscores his conceptual wit with the work’s punning title, later made explicit in his sculpture Picture and Pitcher (1977-78, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York).
Two years after Pitcher Triptych, Lichtenstein created two further works, Portrait Triptych and Cow Triptych (Cow Going Abstract), which animate the same shift from figuration to abstraction. The latter riffs directly on a series of drawings that the De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg made in preparation for his abstract Composition VIII (The Cow) (c. 1917-18, Museum of Modern Art, New York); it also recalls Picasso’s famous lithograph The Bull (1945), which likewise successively refines the animal to its most essential form. These works seem to visualise an idea of abstraction as evolution – particularly for the utopian van Doesburg, who used some of his cow drawings to illustrate the human soul’s conversion of sensory inputs into pure ‘aesthetic experience’ in his instructional book Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (1925). If less idealistic in his outlook, Lichtenstein shared something of this diagrammatic spirit. He was heavily informed by the teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman, an engineer and figurative painter whose innovative drawing course he attended at Ohio State University in the 1940s. Sherman’s rigorous conceptions of imagistic unity, perceptual depth, negative space and relational size – all tied to advances in science and psychology – are evident in works like Pitcher Triptych, and would remain greatly influential throughout Lichtenstein’s practice.
Lichtenstein saw any given art-historical idiom as just one message-system among many, each as provisional as the next. While they clearly refer to totemic works of modernism, the triptychs’ sequential layout also echoes the imagery and structure of printed comic strips, a form with which the artist had engaged throughout the 1960s. Indeed, a comic-triptych from this period, As I Opened Fire (1964, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), offers a compositional precedent for the present work, with its zooming close-up of an aeroplane’s firing guns creating a similar narrative momentum. Lichtenstein relished the ‘accidental’ modernism of the comics’ visual style, with their flattening of space and simplification of form.
In the same mode, Pitcher Triptych’s more abstract panels also relate to Lichtenstein’s 1960s series of ‘Modern’ paintings, which paraphrased the decorative tropes of Art Deco that surrounded him as he grew up in 1930s New York. He wryly called the style ‘Cubism for the home’ – a domestication of Picasso’s radical revision of our ways of seeing. Much like the comic strips, Art Deco offered a vision of modernist visual language transposed to the realm of kitsch. ‘I think they believed that simplicity was art’, Lichtenstein said. ‘They believed very much in the rational and logical. To me there is something humorous in being that logical and rational about a work of art – using a diagonal that goes from one corner of the picture to another and using arcs that have their midpoint at the edge of the picture. All these are very logical things: dividing pictures into halves or thirds, or repeating images three times or five times. They used these formulas because they thought that if they did it would be art. Actually, it can be. There are two things here: the naïve quality of believing that logic would make art, and the possibility that it could’ (R. Lichtenstein, ‘Interview with Paul Katz’, Art Now: New York, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1969, unpaged).
This ambivalent, gently absurdist attitude is typical of Lichtenstein, whose keen sense of satire never amounted to mockery. Pitcher Triptych enacts modernism’s ‘rational and logical’ sensibility – with which he certainly held some common ground – neither as a collapse nor as a march forward; it rather exploits the ambiguity of Lichtenstein’s various sources, and the subtleties of their translation into his own distinctive painterly language, to create a humorous, sharply intelligent look at the profuse complexity of image-making in the twentieth century. The cool, flawless surface of the work, which is painted in Lichtenstein’s trademark pristine blend of oil and Magna paint, elides all evidence of the artist’s hand. He collides multiple competing, fluctuating memories of signs, ideas and styles in a zone that is confounding in its perfection, a level playing field where no single message wins out. ‘The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire’, he once said, ‘and I really don’t know what the implication of that is’ (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in B. Glaser, ‘Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion’, Artforum, vol. 4, no. 6, p. 23).
For Lichtenstein, all modes of art-making were subject to obsolescence, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to Pop itself; as early as 1965, he said that ‘no one can become a Pop artist now’ (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. Glueck, ‘Warhol’s Pad is Scene of Blast Launching “Pop Art”, New Book’, New York Times, 30 June 1965, p. 43). Typical of his complex, analytical approach, Pitcher Triptych is less a representation of an object than an exploration of painterly styles and signals. As Jack Cowart has noted, the ‘going-abstract’ sequence of this work creates ‘a wonderful perceptual joke. In truth the initial image is, in reference to virtual reality, no less abstract than the nominally abstract image depicted at the end. It is the same reality except for the difference of stylistic nomenclatures. The artist loads the story to confuse, amuse and upset our present hierarchies’ (J. Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980, exh. cat. Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri 1981, p. 64). Lichtenstein underscores his conceptual wit with the work’s punning title, later made explicit in his sculpture Picture and Pitcher (1977-78, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York).
Two years after Pitcher Triptych, Lichtenstein created two further works, Portrait Triptych and Cow Triptych (Cow Going Abstract), which animate the same shift from figuration to abstraction. The latter riffs directly on a series of drawings that the De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg made in preparation for his abstract Composition VIII (The Cow) (c. 1917-18, Museum of Modern Art, New York); it also recalls Picasso’s famous lithograph The Bull (1945), which likewise successively refines the animal to its most essential form. These works seem to visualise an idea of abstraction as evolution – particularly for the utopian van Doesburg, who used some of his cow drawings to illustrate the human soul’s conversion of sensory inputs into pure ‘aesthetic experience’ in his instructional book Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (1925). If less idealistic in his outlook, Lichtenstein shared something of this diagrammatic spirit. He was heavily informed by the teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman, an engineer and figurative painter whose innovative drawing course he attended at Ohio State University in the 1940s. Sherman’s rigorous conceptions of imagistic unity, perceptual depth, negative space and relational size – all tied to advances in science and psychology – are evident in works like Pitcher Triptych, and would remain greatly influential throughout Lichtenstein’s practice.
Lichtenstein saw any given art-historical idiom as just one message-system among many, each as provisional as the next. While they clearly refer to totemic works of modernism, the triptychs’ sequential layout also echoes the imagery and structure of printed comic strips, a form with which the artist had engaged throughout the 1960s. Indeed, a comic-triptych from this period, As I Opened Fire (1964, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), offers a compositional precedent for the present work, with its zooming close-up of an aeroplane’s firing guns creating a similar narrative momentum. Lichtenstein relished the ‘accidental’ modernism of the comics’ visual style, with their flattening of space and simplification of form.
In the same mode, Pitcher Triptych’s more abstract panels also relate to Lichtenstein’s 1960s series of ‘Modern’ paintings, which paraphrased the decorative tropes of Art Deco that surrounded him as he grew up in 1930s New York. He wryly called the style ‘Cubism for the home’ – a domestication of Picasso’s radical revision of our ways of seeing. Much like the comic strips, Art Deco offered a vision of modernist visual language transposed to the realm of kitsch. ‘I think they believed that simplicity was art’, Lichtenstein said. ‘They believed very much in the rational and logical. To me there is something humorous in being that logical and rational about a work of art – using a diagonal that goes from one corner of the picture to another and using arcs that have their midpoint at the edge of the picture. All these are very logical things: dividing pictures into halves or thirds, or repeating images three times or five times. They used these formulas because they thought that if they did it would be art. Actually, it can be. There are two things here: the naïve quality of believing that logic would make art, and the possibility that it could’ (R. Lichtenstein, ‘Interview with Paul Katz’, Art Now: New York, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1969, unpaged).
This ambivalent, gently absurdist attitude is typical of Lichtenstein, whose keen sense of satire never amounted to mockery. Pitcher Triptych enacts modernism’s ‘rational and logical’ sensibility – with which he certainly held some common ground – neither as a collapse nor as a march forward; it rather exploits the ambiguity of Lichtenstein’s various sources, and the subtleties of their translation into his own distinctive painterly language, to create a humorous, sharply intelligent look at the profuse complexity of image-making in the twentieth century. The cool, flawless surface of the work, which is painted in Lichtenstein’s trademark pristine blend of oil and Magna paint, elides all evidence of the artist’s hand. He collides multiple competing, fluctuating memories of signs, ideas and styles in a zone that is confounding in its perfection, a level playing field where no single message wins out. ‘The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire’, he once said, ‘and I really don’t know what the implication of that is’ (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in B. Glaser, ‘Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion’, Artforum, vol. 4, no. 6, p. 23).