“Lichtenstein focused on brushwork as the signature of a style and used it... to address the issue of what characterizes style in art. Is it defined by an artist’s brushstroke? Is it the result of the transmutation of one form into another? Or could it even be determined by an artist’s signature on a common object? Or does it embrace all of these? In White Brushstroke I and other paintings of the period, Lichtenstein implies that painting can be reduced to a sign and that brushstrokes can be the means by which we recognize, not only a style – but content.”
Bold, brilliant, and thrillingly irreverent, White Brushstroke I is the ultimate embodiment of Roy Lichtenstein’s pioneering investigation into the form, content, and meaning of Contemporary Art. An exhilarating confrontation with the towering legacy of American Abstract Expressionism, White Brushstroke I invokes the impulsive, gestural mode of that movement within the sleekly commercial style of Lichtenstein’s signature Pop idiom. Perfectly centered against the artist’s trademark background of Ben-Day dots, the painter’s mark is transformed into a gesture of control rather than spontaneity in a daring challenge to the canonical hegemony imposed by that most essential motion of a painter’s practice. Painted in 1965, White Brushstroke I is among the most iconic of Lichtenstein’s limited group of fifteen Brushstroke paintings; regarded as pivotal masterworks of the Pop Art movement, eight of these paintings are already held in or promised to such museum collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among celebrated others.
In One Brushstroke, Lichtenstein Tells the Story of Pop Art
“I walked into Leo Castelli’s gallery, and found that Lichtenstein’s paintings had quite literally cleared the air.”
Underscoring the significance of the present work, White Brushstroke I has been featured in numerous seminal exhibitions of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, including both the artist’s early survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1969 and the major traveling exhibition Roy Lichtenstein, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1993. The painting’s provenance is equally extraordinary: following its debut in the seminal Brushstrokes exhibition at Castelli Gallery in New York in 1965 alongside other key examples from the series, White Brushstroke I was acquired that same year by Irving Blum. The founder of the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and Lichtenstein's own West Coast dealer at the time, Blum held the present work in his celebrated personal collection for almost three decades. Utterly breathtaking in its conceptual potency and daring simplicity, White Brushstroke I is the quintessential masterwork—not only of Roy Lichtenstein’s oeuvre—but of Pop Art itself.
In its single, sinuous ivory form—complete with sumptuous drips and splatters—set against a precise field of Ben-Day dots, White Brushstroke I stands as the ultimate, elegant embodiment of this rarefied series; dispensing with the multicolored and layered strokes of his other Brushstroke paintings, the purified composition of the present work achieves a singular artistic statement of unparalleled visual potency. While other examples of the series suspend a single stroke above a larger expanse of Ben-Day dots, the arrangement of White Brushstroke I invokes the same compositional magnetism of the artist’s iconic single-object paintings of 1961-1963, in which the primary subject is centrally placed in relation to the canvas edge; much like Portable Radio or ice Cream Soda, the present work achieves an extraordinary purity of image-making. While Johns settled on the image of the flag as a blank slate upon which to explore the formal properties of paint, Lichtenstein remained highly aware that the viewer's preconceptions of objects operate as an integral component of perception - as much so as color, composition and technique.
Highlighting the particular elegance of the present work, Diane Waldman describes:
“Here, the brushstroke is fairly active and suggests movement. We follow the curve of the shape as it travels up from the middle-left part of the canvas and whips back down toward the lower-left-hand corner, only to turn once more and swing up again toward the opposite corner. The drips in the lower right corner of the canvas create a subtle balance to the upward curve of the brushstroke. And the drips that run off the bottom of the lower edges of the brushstroke firmly anchor the form in place.”
The sinuous black contours of the white brushstroke suggest inky shadows, emphasizing a sense of volume within the image; as if to underscore this three-dimensionality, Lichtenstein adds a final drip at the lower right of the canvas that seemingly slips off the picture plane entirely. Simultaneously, the crisp background of Ben-Day dots – their orderly repetition diametrically opposed to the rebellious contours of the brushstroke – powerfully recalls the two-dimensional nature of the image before us, providing a sharp contrast to the freedom of handling so characteristic of painterly expression. Upon close examination, the faint shadows of the artist’s original graphite under-drawing are discernible below the pristine painted image, serving as a subtle reminder to the viewer that, despite the suggestion of mass-production, the artist’s hand has created the painting before us. Within Lichtenstein’s composition, the brushstroke is at once object and image, moving and still, controlled and spontaneous, immaculate and intimate. The artist describes: “It’s taking something that originally was supposed to mean immediacy and I’m tediously drawing something that looks like a brushstroke… I want it to look as though it were painstaking. It’s a picture of a picture and it’s a misconstrued picture of a picture.”
ROY LICHTENSTEIN’s
BRUSHSTROKES
1965-1966
Typifying the virtuosic use of popular and mass-produced imagery that has come to define Lichtenstein’s signature mode, the inspiration for the Brushstroke paintings originated – like so many of the artist’s most iconic motifs – in imagery drawn from a comic book. The image originates in a story titled “The Painting,” printed in Strange Suspense Stories in October 1964, in which a tortured artist, Jake Taylor, battles a painting which appears to assume a life of its own; with almost uncanny prescience, the prologue of the story reads: “The act of creating a work of art is an all-consuming task! The true artist must throw himself into this work with complete dedication if the work is to have any real meaning or value… Jake wanted to be a great artist, but he felt that he was on the road toward becoming a clever copyist instead. And this drove him to strange thoughts and impossible flights of imagination…or was it mere imagination?”
Following the first Brushstroke painting, which directly duplicates a comic panel showing brushstrokes and a sliver of the artist’s hand and paintbrush, Lichtenstein refined his images to focus solely on the brushstrokes themselves. As he describes, “Although I had played with this idea before, it started with a comic book image of a mad artist crossing out, with a large brushstroke ‘X’, the face of a friend that was haunting him… Then I went on to do paintings of brushstrokes alone. I was very interested in characterizing or caricaturing a brushstroke.” Together, the fifteen Brushstroke paintings represent one of the most significant series of Lichtenstein’s long and prolific career. Although the initial group was produced over a span of only a few months, the motif would become a recurring theme in Lichtenstein’s work, appearing in drawings, sculptures, and prints throughout the following three decades.
White Brushstroke I and the other Brushstroke paintings mark a pivotal moment in the artist’s career-long consideration of art about art: here, for the first time, Lichtenstein turns his questioning gaze on the very act of painting itself. Replacing the popular and commercial imagery which inspired his earlier paintings, the Brushstrokes confront the weighty legacy of Abstract Expressionism as their source material. Searing in their crisp sophistication, Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes offer wry commentary on the explosive strokes and splatters of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, whose action painting had dominated the critical discourse of the preceding decade. One scholar describes, “With the Brushstroke series the artist began to move away from direct appropriation of comics, advertising and other printed sources, and—as with the landscapes and mirror works of the late 1960s and early 1980s—he began to more fully exploit the abstract qualities of his pictorial idiom.” (Mark Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art, New Haven 2002, p. 161)
“Visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture. But, in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of the grand gesture. So the contradiction between what I’m portraying and how I’m portraying it is sharp. The brushstroke became very important for my work.”
At a time when such spontaneous, autographical marks were regarded as the ultimate demonstration of an artist’s prowess, Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes challenge the authority of such inimitable gestures by interpreting painterly mark-making within a commercial, mass-produced style. Reflecting upon the singular significance of the Brushstroke paintings within his oeuvre, Lichtenstein described: “Visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture. But, in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of the grand gesture. So the contradiction between what I’m portraying and how I’m portraying it is sharp. The brushstroke became very important for my work.” (Roy Lichtenstein, A Review of My Work Since 1961, New York 1995, n.p.) Indeed, while White Brushstroke I is devoid of explicit motion, the sinuous contours and sporadic drips of the brushstroke itself hold the inherent suggestion of past movement – an artist’s hand and paint-laden brush, just beyond the confines of the picture plane. Presenting a satirical confrontation of the legacy of gesture itself, in White Brushstroke I Lichtenstein initiates a critical move away from the hegemonic formula of Abstract Expressionism and towards a more incisive and intellectually oriented Pop idiom.
(RIGHT) Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. All Art © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
In its emphasis on explosive motion, held in tension with the detached, ready-made nature and peerless formal execution of Lichtenstein’s Pop aesthetic, White Brushstroke I echoes the emphatic dynamism of the artist’s iconic War Paintings of the early 1960s; in the artist’s own words, “I was very excited about, and interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached, impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in those cartoon images.” (the artist in conversation with John Coplans in: John Coplans, Ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York 1972, p. 52) Just as the reductive simplicity of paintings such as Whaam! and Varoom! articulate the explosive fantasies and emotive charge inherently tied to comic book depictions of war and battle—and our normalization of such imagery within popular culture—the Brushstrokes confront the viewer’s immediate association of emotive expression with abstract painting. Describing the connection between these two bodies of work, one scholar reflects: “In a perverse way, Lichtenstein’s works of the early 1960s exhibit a keen interest in action. He paints about process and not with it…Seeing these works in the context of Lichtenstein’s years of ‘desperate’ struggle with an imitation of action painting provides an insight into this critical period of transition in his work.” (Paul Schimmel in: Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art (and travelling), Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, 1993, p. 46)
Echoing the loaded and emotive gesture of the action painters, now rearticulated with Lichtenstein's signature acuity for such simplified modernist precepts as line, color, and shape, White Brushstroke I achieves an extraordinarily rich conceptual gravitas within the most elegantly reductive visual vernacular. By reducing the present work to a single, sinuous stroke, articulated with searing intensity and graphic force, Lichtenstein further draws attention to the elemental primary nature of generalized signs and symbols.
As John Coplans suggests, “This paring away of the unessential led Lichtenstein to a sharper confrontation with the outside world, to a wider range and sharper focus in his use of stereotype… It is not that Lichtenstein avoids painting the whole figure because it is too complex but, rather, that the whole figure is too specific, too anecdotal for his purpose. Too much detail weakens the focus and the power of the image to immediately and recognizably signal the desired content. Thus, Lichtenstein crops away until he gets to the irreducible minimum and compresses into the format the exact cliché he desires to expose. Lichtenstein’s technique is similar to his imagery: He reduces his form and color to the simplest possible elements in order to make an extremely complex statement. In short, he uses reductive imagery and a reductive technique for their sign-carrying potential.” (John Coplans, Ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York 1972, p. 23) Utterly bewitching in its reductive simplicity, White Brushstroke I strips abstraction of its untamed, inexpressible, and previously unchallenged emotive potency. Against the electrifying clarity of the artist’s Ben-Day ground, the abstract brushstroke is exposed for what it is: the single most loaded signifier of Contemporary art.
Image
In the late 1950s, television sets entered nearly every living room in America, irrevocably shaping the cultural consciousness: in 1949, about one million sets were in use, and by the end of the 1950s, more than fifty million televisions had gained a stronghold in American homes. Amplifying the pervasiveness of the mass media, the introduction of the television enforced an augmented reality driven by highly composed imagery, tightly regulated messages, and universal instantaneity. As visual media became more pervasive, so too did the familiar symbols of ritual idealism—marital, militaristic, and, as in the case of present work, cultural—which began to package innate human desires through consumable images and acquirable realities. Turning to commercial source material, Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dot technique, used to such potent effect in White Brushstroke I, harnessed the impersonal artifice of such mass-reproduced imagery in order to convey highly emotional, charged subject matter, thereby emphasizing the very clichés that underpin the mainstream media. As Otto Hahn described, “His cool detachment creates a shock, produces an interplay, an overturning between the truth of the mechanical artifice and the falsity of the emotion—between the truth of the emotion and the falseness of its translation into image.” (Otto Hahn, "Roy Lichtenstein," in: John Coplans, Ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York 1972, p. 143)
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ART, 1962 (PRIVATE COLLECTION)Across four decades of artistic production, a single and essential theme has defined the heart of Lichtenstein’s practice: art, itself. From the earliest years of his career, his paintings have explored questions of how art is made, how art of the past informs our present, and how we define both art and artist in modern society.
Executed in 1965, White Brushstroke I, alongside the other Brushstroke paintings, marks the explosive genesis of this career-long investigation: here, for the first time, Lichtenstein turns his questioning gaze upon the very act of painting itself. The ultimate ‘art about art,’ the Brushstrokes launched a conceptual project that would follow Lichtenstein across the entirety of his celebrated output.
In its extraordinary investigation of painterly expression, White Brushstroke I stands at the very heart of Roy Lichtenstein’s extraordinary artistic legacy. Although timeless in its elegant simplicity, the single gesture of the present work succeeds in undermining centuries of art historical precedent, marking a pivotal moment in Lichtenstein’s career-long consideration of art about art. Describing the importance of this shift, Diane Waldman remarks: “Lichtenstein focused on [the Abstract Expressionist’s] brushwork as the signature of a style and used it – as he had done with the signature styles of Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian – to address the issue of what characterizes style in art. Is it defined by an artist’s brushstroke? Is it the result of the transmutation of one form into another? Or could it even be determined by an artist’s signature on a common object? Or does it embrace all of these? In White Brushstroke I and other paintings of the period, Lichtenstein implies that painting can be reduced to a sign and that brushstrokes can be the means by which we recognize, not only a style – but content.” (Diane Waldman in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Roy Lichtenstein, 1993, pp. 156-157) A painting of unparalleled dynamism and graphic force, White Brushstroke I surges across the canvas to envelop the viewer in its pictorial exuberance and conceptual gravitas. Standing before this singularly mythic gesture—rendered with unerring accuracy and precision—the viewer is presented with the ultimate encapsulation of Lichtenstein’s most compelling subject matter: art that questions the nature of art itself.
