Roy Lichtenstein’s Two Nudes (1994) is a seminal work from the artist’s Nudes series, the final major body of work he created before his death. Despite his career-long preoccupation with cultural cliches, this late series was the artist’s first concentration on art history’s most prolific motif: the female nude. Through appropriating comic book clippings and employing his iconic vocabulary of Ben-Day dots, the works encapsulate the seminal concerns that recurred throughout his oeuvre. Far beyond a simple study of the female form, Two Nudes is an innovative and profound meditation upon the nature of artistic creation and perception.

Following in the footsteps of many of his forebearers, Lichtenstein rendered the classic theme of the nude later in life. Closely associated with notions of ideal beauty, mythology, sexuality and the study of anatomy, the nude has been a source of endless inspiration. In the modern period, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin utilized their own visual language to render visual masterpieces with an aim not to replicate female form, but rather to explore their own formal concerns. In Two Nudes, by applying his distinctive aesthetic to what is arguably the canon’s most persistent trope, Lichtenstein successfully indexes art history itself while refining his interest in color and pattern applications.

“With my nudes there’s no sense of body flesh or skin tones – they’re so unrealistic – that using them underscored the separation between reality and artistic convention.”

—Roy Lichtenstein

In Two Nudes, the figures and their domestic environment are rendered in bold, cartoonish outlines, overlaid with the artist’s signature dots, and accentuated with color fields of pastel tones reminiscent of 1930s' Art Deco palettes. They are deliberately simplified, lacking corporeal characteristics, sharing minimal connection to the natural world. The dots and stripes act as modelling devices, yet simultaneously insist on the flatness of the picture planes and echo the Japanese woodblock prints that so inspired Lichtenstein. "My nudes are part light and shade, and so are the backgrounds, with dots to indicate the shade," Lichtenstein elucidated. "The dots are also graduated from large to small, which usually suggests modelling in people’s minds, but that’s not what you get with these figures." Evocative of techniques used in commercial printing processes that are typically meant to go unnoticed, here the dots and diagonal lines emphatically convey a complete deconstruction of space.

Rather than studying the human figure from life, Lichtenstein did not draw from models for his Nudes series. Instead, he continued to work from vernacular imagery, specifically, from the August 1963 #94 issue of Girls’ Romances, a romance comic anthology published by DC Comics. In the original clipping, a blonde girl sits on the side of a bed, consoling her friend, who is visibly upset with her head buried into the duvet. In a large speech-bubble, the blonde girl assures here friend – “Don’t cry, Nora – Dick will come back to you…”. On the dresser, among make-up and hair products, there is a photo frame with a man smiling out. However, unlike his earlier works that closely reproduced comic-book scenes, in the Nudes series Lichtenstein deviates and removes the figures’ clothes. Additional contextual details – the speech bubble, the photo-frame, the make-up products scattered around the girls' room – are removed from Lichtenstein’s rendition. The artist perceived these later Nudes as a pronounced departure from his early ironic portrayals of sentimental comic book love stories, which he described as "perfectly pure" and "ending in a nice kiss". While they do indeed encompass a similar essence of femininity and sensuality as his earlier creations, the late nudes revel in their own presence, devoid of any semblance of dependency or yearning for a male presence.

“I want to hide the records of my hand.”

—Roy Lichtenstein

The Nudes series began in late 1993, when, in his New York studio, Lichtenstein started making the collage studies that would serve as models for the subsequent print series. In early 1994, Lichtenstein enlisted his long-term collaborator, the master-printer Kenneth Tyler, and set to work at the Tyler Graphics Ltd. studio in Mount Kisco, New York, meticulously hand-cutting Rubylith stencils to outline each image. Five of the outlines were then translated onto magnesium relief printing plates and one onto a plastic relief plate. The iconic Ben-Day dots were created on a computer, then transferred to positive film before additional Rubylith stencils were cut for the block colors and diagonal lines. The stencils and films of dots were then registered using the original outline sketches and made into individual color relief printing plates. Finally, voluptuous layers of pigment were printed to BFK Rives paper, ensuring a finished result with extremely rich colors and crisply delineated forms. Typifying Lichtenstein’s iconic machine-made aesthetic, this meticulous process enabled the metamorphosis of his comic book cuttings into monumental editions that engage with not just the art historical canon, but also our very perception of a fine art print.