Executed in 1995, Roy Lichtenstein’s Beach Scene with Starfish (Study) encapsulates the artist’s career-long dialogue with the unprecedented creativity of Pablo Picasso in striking clarity. Through his characteristically bold colours and graphic logic, Lichtenstein renders a dynamic tableau at the water’s edge. In direct compositional reference to Picasso’s iconic Baigneuses au Ballon, Lichtenstein reimagines the beach scene through his revered Pop Art lens, crafting a billet-doux – at once playful, irreverent, and intellectually astute – to the modernist master he so admired. Executed just two years before Lichtenstein’s death, Beach Scene with Starfish (Study) marks the culmination of his ongoing engagement with the bather motif – one he revisited and reimagined throughout his career. Affirming the work’s importance in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, the fully realised Beach Scene with Starfish, painted later that same year, is held in the esteemed collection of the Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland. With exceptional provenance, the present work comes from the personal collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, where it has remained since its creation.

Beach Scene with Starfish (Study) presents an outstanding example of the artist’s sustained investigations into the aesthetic sensibility of American consumption and commercialism. Demonstrating his artistic process, Lichtenstein’s coloured shading in the present work is transformed into Ben-Day dots in the fully realised painting. In his contributions to the art historical genre of bathers, Lichtenstein based his depictions of women on the DC comics and advertisements that he collected and scoured. In so doing, Lichtenstein confronts his audience with the idealised vision and sexualisation of women as broadcast in popular culture. In the present work, the erotic mythology and formal vocabulary of Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse years is recontextualised by Lichtenstein’s aesthetic vocabulary. Lichtenstein’s depiction of a beach hut in the present work directly references the same secluded structure Picasso often painted, where he and Marie-Thérèse would meet for their clandestine rendezvous. Recalling the joyous scene Henri Matisse depicted in La Danse I, housed in the Museum of Modern Art, Lichtenstein similarly draws a composition with remarkable fluidity and dynamic movement.

While still heavily referencing Picasso, the present work no longer bears the weight of surrealist imagery that Lichtenstein interrogated in the 1970s. Instead, Lichtenstein’s deliberately iconographic encoding of pointed allusions to Picasso is paired with a Pop sensibility that distinguishes his 1990s Nudes as markedly different from his previous work. Lichtenstein’s earliest foray into the subject is marked by his iconic Girl with Ball (1961), held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which distilled the visual codes of post-war advertising into a tightly composed Pop image. Lichtenstein’s second series of bathers emerged in 1977, comprising a body of surrealist-inflected beach scenes, each filtered through the narrative lens of Picasso. While other titans of art history – such as Paul Cézanne, with his lifelong preoccupation with bathers, and Salvador Dalí, with his biomorphic nudes – also served as touchstones, Picasso’s profound influence on Lichtenstein extended beyond mere subject matter.

A tour de force of late Lichtenstein, Beach Scene with Starfish (Study) encapsulates the artist’s singular ability to distil high modernism through the seductive vernacular of Pop. At once homage and critique, the work demonstrates Lichtenstein’s deep reverence for Picasso while asserting his own place within the canon of twentieth-century art. Rich in historical allusion, conceptual wit, and visual vitality, this radiant composition stands not only as a culminating statement in Lichtenstein’s celebrated bather series, but as a testament to his lifelong ambition: to make pictures that both reflect and reshape the cultural imagery of his time.