At once mechanical and handcrafted, Roy Lichtenstein’s Brush Stroke, Still Life with Lamp toys with romantic notions surrounding the artist’s gesture. Combining methods of silkscreen with hand painted elements on aluminium, the present work explores what the artist termed the ‘obliterating brush stroke’ which effaces elements of the work beneath it as it sweeps over the surface of an image. This concept came to Lichtenstein in a dream and has permeated his artistic practice since the mid-1960s. Brushstroke, Still Life with Lamp is part of an extremely limited series of still life prints executed in 1997, which were among the last works Lichtenstein completed before his death in September of that year. Its companion pieces, Still Life with Coffee Pot and Still Life with Box, though left unfinished at the time of Lichtenstein’s death, also feature these signature brush marks which became the trademark of the Pop era.

Throughout his career, Lichtenstein explicitly engaged with art history, drawing on and responding to a range of sources from modern masters like Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian to contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg. Indeed, it was Rauschenberg who first parodied the now-cliché idea of the gestural brushstroke popularised by Abstract Expressionism when he made his own works from thrown paint and duplicated them. In a conversation with Lichtenstein, art critic David Sylvester draws a connection between the two artists noting that Lichtenstein is “really continuing this by doing these big slashing brushstrokes but doing them in a way in which they’ve been very meticulously and carefully formed… the abstract expressionist brush mark is meant to be a dramatic mark. You make a joke about it, but you make it dramatic again” (David Sylvester, ‘Some Kind of Reality’, in Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Some Kind of Reality, 1997, pp. 15-16).

As a result of his use of ‘popular’ subject matter, Lichtenstein’s work was labelled as ‘Pop art’, a term used for the first time in print by Lawrence Alloway in 1958. However, Lichtenstein considered the popularity of his subjects as the least important aspect of his artistic practice. Instead, he considered his use of mundane objects as crucial to questioning what makes art “art” much like his predecessor Marcel Duchamp. Lichtenstein was one of the few American artists at the time – alongside Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg – who experimented with this concept using a range of techniques including assemblage, appropriation and mass production. Lichtenstein used his early comic paintings as Duchampian ready-mades, taking them out of context and altering the way we look at them. Lichtenstein extends this approach to his interior paintings, extracting advertisements of the ideal home from the Yellow Pages and blowing them up to envelope and overwhelm the viewer, questioning their message that money and material wealth can buy happiness. Brush Stroke, Still Life with Lamp is no exception; standing at four and a half feet tall and six feet wide the fantasy of the middle-class American dream is inescapable.

Lichtenstein throws the reality of this dream into question with his flattened and simplified visual language. He attributes the origins of his characteristic style to Cubism stating: “I think the aesthetic influence on me is probably more Cubism than anything. I think even the cartoons themselves are influences by Cubism, because the hard-edged character which is brought about by the printing creates a kind of cubist look which perhaps wasn’t intended” (Ibid., p. 7). Brush Stroke, Still Life with Lamp seems to reference Picasso and Georges Braque in the conflicting viewpoints being offered by the nightstand, lamp and box, further confused by the maelstrom of painted and printed brushstrokes which blur the scene. Looking back at his art historical antecedents, Lichtenstein actively engages with old ideas to make new and innovative arguments for the importance of art in our contemporary age.