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Lot Essay
Executed in 1982, this work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
"Visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture. But, in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of a grand gesture. So the contradiction between what I'm portraying and how I am portraying it is sharp. The brushstroke became very important for my work" (R. Lichtenstein, A Review of My work since 1961, 1995).
Lichtenstein created sculptures because he was preoccupied with art's formal qualities and the difficult task of representing artistic illusionism's ephemeral nature. In Brushstroke, Roy Lichtenstein playfully confuses and muddies these concepts by combining sculpture, physical brushstrokes and the representation of brushstrokes to produce a work that stimulates our eyes and challenges our ideas of representation. He uses his signature arsenal of techniques and trickery, subverting the recognition of his own paintings and styles, to disrupt how we interpret and understand art and representation. Deferring to sculpture's historic traditions, Lichtenstein assembles, seemingly at random, colored brushstrokes that pay homage to the loose shape of a human form. He takes several things from the tenets that have dominated sculpture for centuries: vertical orientation, the central core and the limb-like horizontal elements. He combines contrasting brushstrokes, painterly gestures - depicted in a form seemingly at odds with the fluidity of what is represented - to produce an image that, in both content and appearance, is multilayered. Brushstroke explodes and reconfigures Pop. In it, Lichtenstein comments on the painterly process and artists like Monet and Van Gogh who reveled in the act, and yet it also takes a side-swipe against those Abstract Expressionists who took that process to extremes.
Lichtenstein owes a debt to Pop, made clear in how he has taken to pieces the two-dimensional image of the brushstrokes, and reconstituted them by combining scraps of painterly movement. "You know, all my subjects are always two-dimensional or at least they come from two-dimensional sources," he pointed out. "In other words, even if I'm painting a room, it's an image of a room that I got from a furniture ad in a phone book, which is a two-dimensional source. This has meaning for me in that when I came onto the scene, abstract artists like Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly were making paintings the point of which was that the painting itself became an object, a thing, like a sculpture, in its own right, not an illusion of something else. And what I've been trying to say all this time is similar: that even if my work looks like it depicts something, it's essentially a flat two-dimensional image, an object" (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in M. Kimmelman, Portraits, Talking with Artists at the Met, The Modern, The Louvre and Elsewhere, reproduced at www.lichtensteinfoundation.org). Finally, Brushstroke is an object that, as with Kelly and Stella, is about painting itself.
"Visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture. But, in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of a grand gesture. So the contradiction between what I'm portraying and how I am portraying it is sharp. The brushstroke became very important for my work" (R. Lichtenstein, A Review of My work since 1961, 1995).
Lichtenstein created sculptures because he was preoccupied with art's formal qualities and the difficult task of representing artistic illusionism's ephemeral nature. In Brushstroke, Roy Lichtenstein playfully confuses and muddies these concepts by combining sculpture, physical brushstrokes and the representation of brushstrokes to produce a work that stimulates our eyes and challenges our ideas of representation. He uses his signature arsenal of techniques and trickery, subverting the recognition of his own paintings and styles, to disrupt how we interpret and understand art and representation. Deferring to sculpture's historic traditions, Lichtenstein assembles, seemingly at random, colored brushstrokes that pay homage to the loose shape of a human form. He takes several things from the tenets that have dominated sculpture for centuries: vertical orientation, the central core and the limb-like horizontal elements. He combines contrasting brushstrokes, painterly gestures - depicted in a form seemingly at odds with the fluidity of what is represented - to produce an image that, in both content and appearance, is multilayered. Brushstroke explodes and reconfigures Pop. In it, Lichtenstein comments on the painterly process and artists like Monet and Van Gogh who reveled in the act, and yet it also takes a side-swipe against those Abstract Expressionists who took that process to extremes.
Lichtenstein owes a debt to Pop, made clear in how he has taken to pieces the two-dimensional image of the brushstrokes, and reconstituted them by combining scraps of painterly movement. "You know, all my subjects are always two-dimensional or at least they come from two-dimensional sources," he pointed out. "In other words, even if I'm painting a room, it's an image of a room that I got from a furniture ad in a phone book, which is a two-dimensional source. This has meaning for me in that when I came onto the scene, abstract artists like Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly were making paintings the point of which was that the painting itself became an object, a thing, like a sculpture, in its own right, not an illusion of something else. And what I've been trying to say all this time is similar: that even if my work looks like it depicts something, it's essentially a flat two-dimensional image, an object" (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in M. Kimmelman, Portraits, Talking with Artists at the Met, The Modern, The Louvre and Elsewhere, reproduced at www.lichtensteinfoundation.org). Finally, Brushstroke is an object that, as with Kelly and Stella, is about painting itself.