Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #7)
Guy Atkins, London
Robert Fraser Gallery, London
Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne
Private collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1986)
Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 2002, Lot 35
Acquired by the present owner from the above

London, Tate Gallery, 54-64: Paintings and Sculpture of a Decade, April - June 1964, p. 264, illustrated
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft; Bern, Kunshtalle; London, Tate Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, November 1967 - December 1968, cat. no. 1
Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Sammlung Helga und Walther Lauffs, November 1983 - April 1984, cat. no. 222, p, 76, illustrated in color
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Roy Lichtenstein, October 1993 - September 1994, cat. no. 73, illustrated in color
Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, (extended loan), 1997
Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Werke der Pop Art aus der Sammlung Lauffs, March - August 2002, p. 19, illustrated

"Sunday Pictures", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 31, 1961, p. 10, illustrated in color
Bruno Alfieri, "U.S.A.: Towards the End of 'Abstract' Painting", Metro, Milan, 1962, p. 11, illustrated
Richard Hamilton, "Roy Lichtenstein", Studio International 175, Vol 896, January 1968, p. 22, illustrated
Phyllis Tuchman, "American Art in Germany: The History of a Phenomenon", ArtForum, Vol. 9, May 1971, p. 75, illustrated
Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1971, pl. no. 15, illustrated in color
John Coplans, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, pl. 3, p. 70, illustrated
Janis Hendrickson, Roy Lichtenstein, Cologne, 1988, p. 30, illustrated in color
Marco Livingston in, Exh. Cat., Shinjuko, Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, Pop Muses: Images of Women by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Tokyo, 1991, p. 9, illustrated 
Robert Rosenblum, "Roy Lichtenstein: Past Present, Future", Art Studio, Vol, 20, Spring 1991, p. 41, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1993, pp. 80-81, illustrated in color
Steven H. Madoff, ed., Pop Art, A Critical History, New York, 1997, p. 192
Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop, Cambridge, 1997, p. 111
Marco Livingston, Pop Art, A Continuing History, New York, 2000, fig. no. 100, p. 74, illustrated in color
Michael Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art, New York and New Haven, 2002, fig. 71, p. 112, illustrated in color

Step-on Can with Leg is a painting that boldly announced the arrival of Roy Lichtenstein’s new Pop style in 1961.  A radical break with his previous work, this germinal example of Lichtenstein’s new aesthetic embodies so many of the tenets of Pop Art, that it must be seen not only as a crucial example of the artist’s revolutionary visual vocabulary, but of the movement of Pop Art itself.  

When considering the history of Pop Art, 1961 must be seen as the seminal year in both its emergence and development as a movement.  This is the year that saw the vital connection made between the two chief protagonists of Pop Art, namely Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein.  Moreover, this year also saw the equally important connection made between the two artists and the gallery owner, Leo Castelli, who would passionately champion this movement.  In April 1961, Warhol famously displayed his comic strip and advertising-image paintings in the shop windows of Bonwit Teller, and a fresh and exhilarating form of visual expression thus first became visible in New York.  At this time, Lichtenstein had, coincidentally, been making works based on cartoon characters such as Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and Popeye (1961, Private Collection): a time when he and Warhol were unknown to each other.

Warhol introduced himself to the Leo Castelli Gallery director, Ivan Karp, in the Spring of 1961. In the meantime, Allan Kaprow, the Happenings artist, mentioned Lichtenstein to Karp as a young artist that he should meet and visit.  In a recent discussion with Mr. Karp, he recalled that Lichtenstein came to the gallery in the early Fall of 1961 with a few paintings strapped to the top of his station wagon for viewing, including Look Mickey and Emeralds, both painted that year. In a subsequent visit to Lichtenstein’s studio, Mr. Karp first saw Step-On Can with Leg and Girl with Ball, which also came to the Castelli Gallery.  Leo Castelli was immediately taken with Lichtenstein’s work and agreed to represent him in October 1961 at a stipend of $400 a month. The present work, then, is one of the masterpieces that served to establish the powerful relationship between the artist and his primary dealer, Castelli.  Mr. Karp also recalls that, while Girl with Ball was the first painting by Lichtenstein included in a group show at the Castelli Gallery, it was Step-On Can with Leg that was the first work by Lichtenstein sold by the gallery.  It was purchased by the London scholar, Guy Atkins for $275, followed by the second sale of Girl with Ball to Philip Johnson for $425, which was subsequently donated to The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The new, restrained sensibility and method inherent to his Pop paintings of 1961 represented a radical shift from his earlier work which, in general, were whimsical interpretations of European Modernism indebted to artists such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.  In 1958, the artist began to flirt with a jovial, cartoon-like style and he made ink drawings of comic-strip characters, mainly to entertain his children.  But it is the year 1961 that saw him commit completely to this new, objective mechanized style and expression.  Lichtenstein’s subject matter would have been influenced greatly by the possibilities opened up by Happenings, and formality, by the solutions proposed by Japser Johns’ object paintings.  The summer of 1961 saw Lichtenstein begin to make a series of works based upon advertising images he sourced from newspapers and magazines.  His new aesthetic, one which essentially purloined and then amplified these printed images onto canvas in a manner that denied, as much as possible, any record of the artist, or his artistry, was extraordinary.  The idea of translating a model of mass production onto canvas, and to remain as faithful as possible in the process of that translation to the original paradigm, was as radical a moment in Twentieth Century art history as any.  It was also a manifestation of the Pop aesthetic in its most extreme conceptual form.  This artistic goal also explains Lichtenstein’s equally radical technique. 

In order to achieve a verisimilitude of, and faithfulness to, his printed sources, Lichtenstein needed to make his paintings look like they were printed.  He therefore made no apparent changes to composition: his focus was not on design but on illusion.  His style quickly became extremely graphic, revealing a strong sense of delineation and an emphasis on saturated color.  This depersonalized technique was further achieved through his painterly mimicry of the printing process.  Step-On Can with Leg is one of the very first paintings where Lichtenstein approximated the effect of newspaper printing by treating clearly demarcated areas as a thin film of rubbed color which would exaggerate the coarse grain of the canvas, appearing like pixilated dots.  The effect, here clearly evident in the legs and floor of the work, refers to the properties of printed Benday dots.  In the present work, these ‘dots’ are all achieved by hand.  Later works would see the artist apply his paint through a screen perforated with a grid of identical holes, literally removing his hand from the canvas and further distancing him from his own work, thereby exaggerating the sense of mechanical reproduction he so desired.

Step-On Can with Leg is thus a work that plucks from obscurity a banal image of a, typically glamorous, housewife of the early 1960’s, displaying the benefits of the new ‘step-on can’.  Her pretty foot shows the ‘before’ and ‘after’ effects of this new device.  Lichtenstein is not interested in displaying this woman; there is no need to include the individual because the most important ‘character’ here is the trashcan, decorously treated with its floral pattern.  The advertisement, as well as the painting, privileges the trash can over the dislocated female figure as an ‘object’ of desire.  It is the trash can that is being sold, and thus the focal point of Lichtenstein’s painting.  Interestingly, the painting is conceived as a diptych, and in so doing, the artist not only remains faithful to the original source, but by extension, connects the work to art-historical precedents, particularly Netherlandish panel paintings.  Step-On Can with Leg is structured as a kind of contemporary take on votive paintings: a means of glorifying and contemplating not a god, but the new religion of mass consumerism. 

The importance of Step-On Can with Leg cannot be overstressed.  Its frontality and centralized presentation coheres with the direct assertion of subject and object central to the credo of Pop Art.  Its simplicity, austerity even, anticipates the Minimalist movement of the mid 1960’s.  Just as Donald Judd’s works can only be seen as pure, static objects in space, so, too, can Step-On Can with Leg be seen as a painting that stresses the fixing of image and the painting itself as a static object.  Action is here not represented, but merely implied  Step-On Can with Leg  must be seen as a radical moment in Lichtenstein’s artistic development, and a glorious example of the very best that Pop Art has to offer the mind and the eye.