"Pop art as we know it is the permanent theater of this tension: on one hand the mass culture of the period is present as a revolutionary force which contests arts; and on the other, art is present in it as a very old force which irresistibly returns in the economy of societies."
Roy Lichtenstein’s Portrait Triptych is a sophisticated and deeply reflective 1970s work that reaffirms his position as one of the most innovative and conceptually rigorous artists of the postwar era. Often associated with comic book aesthetics and popular culture, Lichtenstein is here revealed not simply as a painter of Pop, but as a visual thinker profoundly engaged with the history of representation. In Portrait Triptych, he revisits one of the most enduring themes in art, the human figure, exploring how it functions as an image. Through a visually striking and intellectually layered progression, Lichtenstein draws on influences ranging from Picasso to Mondrian, from mass media to modernism, reasserting the figure as a site of formal experimentation.
Each of the three panels marks a different stage in the visual deconstruction of the female portrait, a subject that had defined much of Lichtenstein’s early Pop imagery. The left panel features the quintessential Lichtenstein blonde: wide-eyed, red-lipped, framed in graphic lines and Ben-Day dots. She is immaculate, polished, and familiar, a nod to both postwar advertising and golden age Hollywood glamour. In the present work, as in his early 1960s comic-inspired works, Lichtenstein walks a fine line between seduction and critique, presenting the female face as both icon and artifact. The central panel signals a conceptual and formal shift, drawing from Lichtenstein’s sustained engagement with the legacy of Cubism. The face, once whole, is now fragmented: hair rendered in stylized waves, a geometric eye, the line of a nose intersecting with curved planes. The figure becomes a diagram, echoing Picasso’s synthetic portraits while maintaining the clarity and cleanliness of Lichtenstein’s graphic style. In this moment of transition, Lichtenstein invites the viewer to see the portrait not as a representation of a person but as a composition of visual cues.
By the final panel, the image has fully transformed into abstraction. There is no face or body, only bold diagonal lines, color blocks, and the residual rhythm of the figure. This echoes the logic of the earlier Cow Triptych and Pitcher Triptych, works in which Lichtenstein similarly deconstructs a familiar subject across three stages. These works were directly inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s progressive abstractions, such as Composition VII (The Cow), which in turn linked back to the visual ideals of De Stijl and Mondrian. However, unlike Mondrian’s quest for spiritual equilibrium through pure abstraction, Lichtenstein’s forms carry the ghost of representation: the red stripes recall a blouse, the slanted angles hint at a shoulder or a jawline, and the compositional rhythm continues to echo the body. The idea of transformation through form would take on new life in Lichtenstein’s subsequent Perfect/Imperfect paintings created in the 1980s. These works, which play with the boundaries of the picture plane and the tension between systematic structure and compositional disruption, continue the themes set forth in the triptychs: how images are built, how logic can unravel, and how visual systems can both define and defy expectations.
This movement from figuration to abstraction mirrors not just a conceptual investigation but the trajectory of Lichtenstein’s own career. The blonde stands as a uniquely striking exemplar of his early Pop period, while the Cubist inflection in the center panel reveals his deep engagement with the modernist canon. The final panel, abstract but referential, foreshadows his late-career interest in the mechanics of image-making. As Hal Foster writes, Lichtenstein “provides an illusionistic image and tricks the eye, but he also breaks the illusion and exposes the trick” (Hal Foster quotes in: Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian, Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture, September - October 2005, p. 11). This duality between surface and structure runs through Portrait Triptych. It is not just a portrait of a woman, but a portrait of the image itself.
