"Lichtenstein remains an artist of absorbing contradictions. His inventiveness is rooted in imitation; he transformed the very idea of borrowing into a profoundly generative, conceptual position, one that alters the trajectory of Modernism, and beyond."
Fusing a playful palette and a rigorous intellectual project, Purist Still Life with Pitcher is a stunning articulation of Roy Lichtenstein’s brilliant command of line, colour and concept. In the late 1960s, Lichtenstein shifted his attention away from the comic-inspired paintings of the previous decade and toward the art historical canon of the 20th century, composing a series of paintings in a plethora of styles ranging from 19th-century American still life, to Art Deco, Impressionism, Cubism, and Purism. The present work from 1975 is the final and most resolved of a group of 13 Purist Still Lifes completed that year, at least 3 of which reside in major museum collections around the world. Exemplifying Lichtenstein’s celebrated reductive aesthetic and intuitive compositional awareness, Purist Still Life with Pitcher ironically translates the tenets and tropes of Purism into the artist’s own signature Ben-Day dotted Pop Art style. Using a minimum of colours and decorative art-nouveau forms, Lichtenstein here constructs his mock Purist composition from layered planes of juxtaposed colour and line to achieve a uniformity and control which blends the mechanical aesthetic of mass reproduction with this bastion of Modernism. Testifying to its significance, the present work has been exhibited widely at institutions such as the Whitney Museum, New York; the Milan Triennale; Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; and Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, among others. One of few works that Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein retained for their personal collection, Purist Still Life with Pitcher, alongside the other choice examples from their collection, provides a rare glimpse into Roy's process and artistic development.
Lichtenstein’s Purist Still Life Paintings in Museum Collections
Lichtenstein first appropriated the still life as subject matter briefly in his early 1960s paintings of single objects, such as Tire, 1962 (MoMA, New York). Placed against a flat monochromatic background and rendered in black and white, Tire is a bold example of Lichtenstein's early forays into the stark, graphic style common to print advertisements and mechanically reproduced images. Returning to the still life in 1971, Lichtenstein's later canvases depict more complex compositions yet retain the highly graphic quality of his earlier works. Here, Lichtenstein balances between a harmonious dialogue with the tenets of modernism and a distinctly contemporary sensibility, inserting the artificiality and reproducibility of the modern-day image into the “high culture” of fine art. Thus, the present work destabilises the very depth, form, and figuration that viewers come to expect from an orthodox still life work. Whether it be Dutch still lifes of resounding symbolic profundity, Cubist still lifes that wrestle with the limits of representation, or contemporary still lifes by contemporaries like David Hockney and Lucian Freud, the present work engages within a sincere conversation that interrogates the capacities and limits of the genre. Undeniably a metonym for the scaffolding principles of art history, the still life takes on a new role in Lichtenstein’s work and becomes a physical embodiment of the reflection on art history that defines the artist’s mature practice.
“I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture. It isn't thick or thin brushstrokes, it's dots and flat colors and unyielding lines.”
A departure from the 1960s pop culture imagery which he had already conquered, in the 1970s Lichtenstein turned his focus to the art historical canon. Championed by Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, and Amédée Ozenfant, Purism arose in the 1920s, in the aftermath of Cubism as a movement that espoused an aesthetic tabula rasa. Seeking out everyday objects such as bottles and glasses as the subject matter for their still life compositions, Purism celebrated the functional quality of these utilitarian items by paring them down their most elemental form. Informed both by the Purist interest in ubiquitous objects, and Pop’s engagement with generic consumer good advertisements, Lichtenstein’s Purist Pictures unite the mutual ambition of both movements to distil a composition to one which is immediately recognisable. Overturning the ordered precision and rational, mathematically-based principles that govern Purist compositions, Lichtenstein’s hatching and Ben-Day dots articulate and define the various shadings, textures and perspectives within this still life. A crucial element of Purism was its embrace of technology and concurrent presentation of objects as basic forms stripped of detail – ideals which struck a chord with Lichtenstein’s own praxis and boldly diluted, machinated aesthetic. The processes and aesthetic values that Lichtenstein shared with Purism lends Purist Still Life with Pitcher an internal cohesion and logic greater than in many of his takes on other art movements.
An exceptionally profound work from one of the 20th century's most celebrated artists, Purist Still Life with Pitcher simultaneously pays homage to the history of artistic precedent while also challenging the very foundations upon which it rests. Translating the Purist style into the mass produced, simplified aesthetic of the printed cartoon, Lichtenstein subsumes the vital originality of brushwork, style, line and colour into his generic vocabulary of dots and flat colour planes. By subverting “high art” source material with a “lowbrow” mass-media inspired aesthetic, Lichtenstein’s irreverent approach highlights the inherent artifice of pictorial representation as well as reproduction. A thrilling encapsulation of Lichtenstein’s technical process and conceptual ambition, Purist Still Life with Pitcher epitomises the artist’s timeless oeuvre rich with material nuance, and the evolution of his definitive style.