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. 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.”
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.