“I don't think the importance of the art has anything to do with the importance of the subject matter. I think importance resides more in the unity of the composition and in the inventiveness of perception.”
—Roy LichtensteinA perfectly framed vignette of Post-War America at home, Red Lamp sees Lichtenstein build upon his 1990 Interiors Series, a body of work that Leo Castelli acknowledged has become synonymous with the great Pop Artist. As the iconic gallerist once said, "what I see when I stand in front of any interior of Roy’s is a work of an important artist that I immediately recognize: a Calder, a blue sponge sculpture by Yves Klein, a Lichtenstein, a Johns from the eighties…” It was with Leo Castelli Gallery that Lichtenstein co-published this lithograph to benefit the Village Nursing Home, an AIDS and geriatric care facility in Manhattan. Executed in the primary red and yellow hues and simplified comic-book style that launched his early career, Lichtenstein created a print that could only be recognized as his own. Drafted with a high vantage point, Lichtenstein invites the viewer into this imagined living room and evokes the sense that they too can plop into the waiting armchair.
Unlike many of his subjects, Lichtenstein’s musings on interior scenes began as prints before he ever rendered paintings of the same themes. On March 15th, 1989, Roy Lichtenstein became artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Like many artists before, Rome would be a source of inspiration for Lichtenstein, but unlike his predecessors, the eternal forms of antiquity were not what caught his eye. Rather, Lichtenstein was struck by a furniture advertisement on the side of the road. Intrigued by the simultaneously inviting yet uninhabitable quality of the showroom in the ad, Lichtenstein spent the following evenings thumbing through the yellow pages with a pair of scissors, clipping similarly staged interiors. By removing any context of the interior where this armchair, table, and lamp might reside, Red Lamp conjures the furniture advertisements that initially inspired the Interior Series published with Gemini G.E.L. in 1990.
Unlike the prints in the Interior Series, which depict elaborate scenes full of pattern, texture, and self-referential details, Red Lamp reflects the editorial decision often made by mid-century advertisers to highlight furniture in a void of negative space – encouraging the consumer to picture the piece of furniture in their own home. Former Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago Robert Fitzpatrick praised Lichtenstein’s interiors for masterfully displaying “folly of domestic conventions that alternately inspire and reflect these lifeless images.”
