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拍品專文
This work will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Working within the medium of sculpture was a significant aspect of Roy Lichtenstein’s art practice from the beginnings of his career in the 1960s right through to the last decade of the artist’s life in the 1990s. Here, Brushstroke Head II translates the artist’s signature Pop style into three-dimensional form as it shares the qualities of Lichtenstein’s iconic paintings—the graphic, color-splashed, Ben-Day dot universe that was the pop culture’s image of America in the 1950s & 1960s.
Brushstroke II captures many of the defining motifs that Lichtenstein made a career articulating: the visual language derived from the pages of comics and print advertising with their primary colors, bold black lines, and bang! Pow! explosive statements. The flattened forms—Pop culture humor, Ben-Day dots, and, of course, the stylized brushstroke motif itself, are all referenced here. The artist was interested in exploring issues of three-dimensional space via his sculptural versions of his two-dimensional images, and the present work successfully conveys that theme, as the viewer takes note of the stylized facial features (eyes, lips, hair, and face) and the flat plane on which they are depicted.
Lichtenstein had a lifelong fascination with the idea of the brushstroke. Early on he began to explore and deconstruct the motif—what is, essentially, the building block of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself and Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further turning it into a compositional element that could serve as the subject matter of a work. His brushstroke is at once a playful yet serious exploration of key themes in art history: high culture and low art; abstraction and representation; and, of course, the artist’s ironic nod to the slashing painterly gesture so central to the style of the Abstract Expressionist painters.
One of America’s most influential and innovative artists to have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, Lichtenstein was a pioneer of Pop Art, a movement with which he is closely identified. He developed his style based on pictorial motifs of comic strips and print advertisements, which he then interpreted in a style that played-off the crudeness of mid-century era newspaper print production. Lichtenstein deliberately sought out to interrogate commercial art’s visual material, universally reviled by fine artists in the early 1960s, which he then set out to improve upon. The artist’s painted bronze sculptures also challenged the medium’s conventional defining characteristics of three-dimensionality, stability, and solidity. His sculptures tended to be flat and thin and in preparing them this way, Lichtenstein was working to suggest associations closer to those pertaining to the drawn line than to sculpture’s solid mass.
Roy Lichtenstein tackled head-on conventional notions of taste and quality. What was typically disparaged as trivial, he elevated to a classical and mythical status. “To all of [Lichtenstein’s] images there was…a particular and unmistakably American quality: a lean, laconic scrutiny of the world that separated his art even from the paintings of Europeans of his generation, like Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke, who also borrowed from pop culture sources” (M. Kimmelman, “Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Master, Dies at 73,”
The New York Times, September 30, 1997).
Lichtenstein’s approach sent American art in an entirely new direction, altering the course of contemporary art and influencing numerous younger artists. The New York Times wrote that at the time of his death “his ideas had so infiltrated art that they were no longer only his. Mixing text and image, high and low, his whole strategy of appropriation paved the way for a generation of artists not yet born, or at least not yet out of elementary school, when he cribbed a picture of a girl holding a beach ball aloft from a newspaper advertisement for Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos” (Ibid.)
Working within the medium of sculpture was a significant aspect of Roy Lichtenstein’s art practice from the beginnings of his career in the 1960s right through to the last decade of the artist’s life in the 1990s. Here, Brushstroke Head II translates the artist’s signature Pop style into three-dimensional form as it shares the qualities of Lichtenstein’s iconic paintings—the graphic, color-splashed, Ben-Day dot universe that was the pop culture’s image of America in the 1950s & 1960s.
Brushstroke II captures many of the defining motifs that Lichtenstein made a career articulating: the visual language derived from the pages of comics and print advertising with their primary colors, bold black lines, and bang! Pow! explosive statements. The flattened forms—Pop culture humor, Ben-Day dots, and, of course, the stylized brushstroke motif itself, are all referenced here. The artist was interested in exploring issues of three-dimensional space via his sculptural versions of his two-dimensional images, and the present work successfully conveys that theme, as the viewer takes note of the stylized facial features (eyes, lips, hair, and face) and the flat plane on which they are depicted.
Lichtenstein had a lifelong fascination with the idea of the brushstroke. Early on he began to explore and deconstruct the motif—what is, essentially, the building block of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself and Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further turning it into a compositional element that could serve as the subject matter of a work. His brushstroke is at once a playful yet serious exploration of key themes in art history: high culture and low art; abstraction and representation; and, of course, the artist’s ironic nod to the slashing painterly gesture so central to the style of the Abstract Expressionist painters.
One of America’s most influential and innovative artists to have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, Lichtenstein was a pioneer of Pop Art, a movement with which he is closely identified. He developed his style based on pictorial motifs of comic strips and print advertisements, which he then interpreted in a style that played-off the crudeness of mid-century era newspaper print production. Lichtenstein deliberately sought out to interrogate commercial art’s visual material, universally reviled by fine artists in the early 1960s, which he then set out to improve upon. The artist’s painted bronze sculptures also challenged the medium’s conventional defining characteristics of three-dimensionality, stability, and solidity. His sculptures tended to be flat and thin and in preparing them this way, Lichtenstein was working to suggest associations closer to those pertaining to the drawn line than to sculpture’s solid mass.
Roy Lichtenstein tackled head-on conventional notions of taste and quality. What was typically disparaged as trivial, he elevated to a classical and mythical status. “To all of [Lichtenstein’s] images there was…a particular and unmistakably American quality: a lean, laconic scrutiny of the world that separated his art even from the paintings of Europeans of his generation, like Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke, who also borrowed from pop culture sources” (M. Kimmelman, “Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Master, Dies at 73,”
The New York Times, September 30, 1997).
Lichtenstein’s approach sent American art in an entirely new direction, altering the course of contemporary art and influencing numerous younger artists. The New York Times wrote that at the time of his death “his ideas had so infiltrated art that they were no longer only his. Mixing text and image, high and low, his whole strategy of appropriation paved the way for a generation of artists not yet born, or at least not yet out of elementary school, when he cribbed a picture of a girl holding a beach ball aloft from a newspaper advertisement for Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos” (Ibid.)