Roy Lichtenstein - New Now New York Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Roy Lichtenstein’s Landscape marries the warmth of an untamed ocean sunset with aspects of industrial consumerist culture. Executed in 1965 during his landscape period, the work is an amalgamation of iridescent pinks and oranges with Lichtenstein’s signature vocabulary of Ben-Day dots and black outlines. Most ingeniously, however, the artist’s usage of Rowlux in Landscape’s bottom third – a shiny plastic sheeting originally employed for highway signage – creates ever-changing surfaces when viewed from different angles.

     

    As a central player of the American postwar Pop Art movement, Lichtenstein is most recognizable for his tongue-in-cheek works based on mass-culture imagery. In a series of collages from 1964-1966, Lichtenstein sought to grow beyond comic book motifs, and turned his graphic visual language towards images of nature — one of the earliest genres he employed and one he returned to consistently.

     

    Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, observed that: 

    “The genre had the added appeal of having already been rendered kitsch by its thorough absorption into popular culture, from postcards of sunsets to picture windows in suburban houses . . . Lichtenstein’s landscapes are therefore not so much pictures of landscapes ‘as of advertising’s saturation of both landscape and painting.’” i

    As Clare Bell of the Lichtenstein Foundation has further pointed out, Lichtenstein explicitly stated that he wanted his landscapes to look ‘vulgar’; in this manner, we can see Lichtenstein’s approach to landscape as intentionally unrefined.ii Lichtenstein’s landscapes are also unique in their lack of spatial recession and their collaged materials, the textural properties of which mimic those evoked by the landscape itself. “Lichtenstein considered Rowlux ‘a sort of ready-made nature... [its] brilliant reflections... like real water reflecting real sunlight,’ rendering it the perfect material with which to articulate the tension between two- and three-dimensional space.”iii

     

    Lichtenstein’s 1960s landscape series would go on to directly influence his film Three Landscapes in 1971: a testament to the artist’s interest in cinema and dedication to cross media experimentation. Thus, Landscape serves as a seminal example of Lichtenstein’s ability to translate popular culture into striking art objects via abstraction. 

     

    Chrissie Iles, “Sea Sickness: Roy Lichtenstein’s Moving Pictures”, in Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, pp. 52-61.

    ii Ibid.

    iii Ibid.

    • Provenance

      Estate of Valerie M. Berliner
      Doyle's, New York, November 6, 1991, lot 6
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

    • Literature

      Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné, October 2023–ongoing, no. RLCR 1084 (RL 0961), online (illustrated)

29

Landscape

signed and dated "rf Lichtenstein 1965" on the reverse
Rowlux collage on board
14 x 20 7/8 in. (35.6 x 53 cm)
Executed in 1965.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$70,000 - 100,000 

Sold for $63,500

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now

New York Auction 12 March 2024