
“I’m interested in this kind of image in the same way as one would develop a classical form… Well, the same thing has been developed in cartoons. It’s not called classical, it’s called a cliché. Well, I’m interested in my work’s redeveloping these classical ways, except that it’s not classical, it’s like a cartoon.”
Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III is a consummate encapsulation of Roy Lichtenstein’s governing artistic inquiry: the investigation of art itself. Engaging with the art historical tradition of trompe l’oeil and challenging the contemporary artistic developments unfolding around him, in Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III Lichtenstein masterfully challenges the definition of art making and the role of the viewer’s perception in the process. Employing his signature Pop idiom, Lichtenstein renders the surface of his painting to represent its reverse, confronting in a new way the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism and the criterion for artistic subject matter. The present work belongs to a rare and limited suite of eleven Stretcher Frame paintings created between 1967-68. Immediately following the iconic Brushstroke paintings of 1965-66, the Stretcher Frame works operate as the counterpart to the Brushstrokes, advancing Lichtenstein’s exploration of “art about art” to a new apogee, playfully articulating a transgressive, Duchampian inquiry of art’s boundaries. Lichtenstein’s son, Mitchell Lichtenstein, remarked of his father’s practice: “I’ll let art historians speak about the loftier aspects of my father’s work, but what I most appreciate is the sense of humor embedded in all of it. It’s a wry humor that was part of who he was every day. While there is so much humor in his work, to my father art was all about composition. When asked for comment about his subject matter, he often said ‘It’s just marks on a page’.” (Mitchell Lichtenstein, April 2025) Held in the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein for nearly six decades, Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III bears exceptional provenance, as one of the treasured works that Roy and Dorothy maintained for themselves.


From the earliest years of Lichtenstein’s practice, he was guided by an investigation of “art about art,” reflecting upon its means of production, its purpose in modern culture, and how its history informs its future. Exploring the visual signs and symbols associated with mass production and comic books, such as flat planes of color, repeated dots to indicate shading, and bold contour lines, Lichtenstein redefined the language of representation in fine art and deconstructed the arbitrary boundaries between "high" and "low." In the early 1960s, beginning with his comic book-inspired paintings and single-object paintings like Portable Radio or Black Flowers, Lichtenstein developed his signature visual vernacular, instantly recognizable for its Ben-Day dots and bold articulation. Even in these early years, Lichtenstein was keenly attuned to foundational, conceptual concerns of his ostensibly playful and direct compositions. As declared in the eponymous text painting, Art from 1962, his investigation extended beyond a formal aesthetic. In the early 60s following Art, Lichtenstein would engage with the art historical canon, responding to the work of Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso as well as Classical architecture. And in 1965-66, the artist would propel his probe of the canon a step further, confronting the weighty legacy of Abstract Expressionism and the very act of painting itself with emphatic and explosive renderings of brushstrokes against precise fields of Ben-Day dots. Immediately following the Brushstrokes, Lichtenstein’s distinct group of eleven Stretcher Frame works tests the parameters of art making and subject matter altogether, representing the conventional “reverse” of a painting and concealing the assumed “front” from view.

“We are moved to question what it is, after all, that has made modern art movements significant or attractive. His imagery consistently refers to the phenomenon and effects of the current deluge of illustrated art books in which everything is changed by small scale, juxtaposition, black-and-white cuts, or four-color process plates and where all visual realities are annulled. Ironically, these items will, no doubt, remain our primary vehicles for learning about and ‘seeing’ art, including the art of Roy Lichtenstein.”
Masterfully witty and cleverly provocative, in the Stretcher Frame paintings, Lichtenstein not only inverts the viewer’s expectations of reality and representation, but also our conception of a painted canvas. In Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III, Lichtenstein renders the reverse of a stretched canvas in a trompe l’oeil technique, revealing the undulating overlap of the canvas, four-member wooden stretcher and even the keys used for tightening the canvas at all four corners. The Stretcher Frame paintings are among few series in which the artist deviated from deliberate assertion of two-dimensionality in his compositions and used light and shadow to convey three-dimensionality. Here, Lichtenstein employs his signature black and yellow Ben-Day dots and flat planes of color to delineate the physical depth of the painting’s support. Lichtenstein asserts the tactile objecthood of the painting instead of its traditional purpose as a vehicle for visual language. The viewer’s ability to engage with the “front” of the canvas is denied by the fact that the “correct” side is facing away from the viewer. Instead, the viewer is situated backstage, privy to the mechanics of the machine as an insider in the making of the painting. Unlike much of the artist’s oeuvre in which flatness is asserted unequivocally, here, when contending with decidedly ordinary subject matter, Lichtenstein veers towards greater verisimilitude in his painting. At every juncture, Lichtenstein challenges the viewer’s preconceived expectations of representation, creating a body of work which feels at once familiar and completely extraordinary.
In Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III, Lichtenstein engages in a captivating dialogue with Surrealism and Dada, in both of which the question of the uncanny relationship between reality and representation is at the center of the movements. Following his investigation of the act of painting through the Brushstrokes, in the Stretcher Frame paintings Lichtenstein contends with art making more broadly repurposing the canonized artistic device of trompe l’oeil through a Pop sensibility. The illusion of Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III invokes the work of René Magritte, such as his epochal The Treachery of Images from 1929, which deconstructs the illusion of painting and the role of the viewer’s perception in the process. Furthermore, the assertion of the inherent artifice of the picture plane calls to mind the artistic challenges purported in the work of Jasper Johns. In his Target With Four Faces from 1955, Johns introduced the pictorial device at the heart of his own investigations, the target, which begs the viewer to enter a semiotic investigation of reality versus its symbol. Through Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III, Lichtenstein, too, blurs the lines of reality and representation and the identity of art in the ever-expanding visual culture of post-war contemporary culture.
“[Lichtenstein’s] antiquarianism is his own peculiarly radical vernacular and he leaves us with source/antisource/nonsource, establishing in this way a contemporary non sequitur.”
A paragon of the central artistic inquiries of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III bears exceptional conceptual gravitas and the signature graphic punch of Lichtenstein’s best work. Testament to its importance in Lichtenstein’s body of work, the painting has been featured in the artist’s most significant solo exhibitions, including the artist’s early survey (1969-70) organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the artist’s seminal traveling lifetime retrospective (1993-96), and the most recent traveling retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work (2012-13) organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.