Roy Lichtenstein

Mr. & Mrs. Leo Castelli, New York (LC# 725)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Saint Louis Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Fort Worth Art Museum, Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980, May 1981 - February 1982, p. 89, illustrated in color
Tokyo, Seibu Museum of Art; Kurashiki City, Ohara Museum of Art, Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980, April - July 1983, p. 85, illustrated in color
Madrid, Fundacion Juan March, Coleccion Leo Castelli, October 1988 - January 1989, pl. 23, illustrated in color
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Munich, Haus der Kunst; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts; Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Roy Lichtenstein, October 1993 - January 1996, cat. no. 178, p. 230, illustrated in color
San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Roy Lichtenstein: A Tribute, January - April 1999 (on extended loan through September 2004)
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, extended loan, September 2003 - March 2006

Lawrence Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1983, pl. no. 83, p. 83, illustrated
Contemporary Great Masters: Roy Lichtenstein, Tokyo, 1992, p. 31, illustrated in color

In the 1970s, Roy Lichtenstein shifted his attention away from the comic inspired paintings of the previous decade towards the great artists and movements of the 20^th century. Specifically focusing upon the manner in which art when reproduced in the mass media was being mechanically flattened, the present work exemplifies Lichtenstein’s celebrated reductive aesthetic and intuitive compositional awareness. Taking as its subject a Purist still life, this work continues Lichtenstein’s ongoing ironic aesthetic of appropriation and reinvention. 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.

The Purist movement had arisen out of the artistic and social conditions of post-World War I Paris in response to Cubism which had become increasingly decorative. Founded by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, (better known as Le Corbusier), its members believed that, “Great art [has] the ideal of generalising” and furthermore must generalise to attain beauty. This was most evident in the Purist still life paintings for which the movement became known. Blending traditional forms and still life elements with modern industrial themes, their work gave modern subject matter and industrial styles a timeless, classical quality by juxtaposing it with ancient Greek architecture and conventional still life forms. 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 thinking and boldly diluted, machinated aesthetic.

The Purist triumvirate of Ozenfant, Corbusier and Fernand Léger led the movement until its end following the exhibition of Purist work at the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau at the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. Lichtenstein began working with Purism after producing a series of Cubist still lives between 1973 and 1975, and it is interesting to note that Lichtenstein’s work inspired by these two movements was in the same chronological sequence as the movements themselves. Thus his progression was a natural as well as a conscious one and followed on from his series of experiments with the still life form which he had begun at the beginning of the 1970s. As with his treatment of Cubism, Lichtenstein’s approach to Purism purposefully ignores the movement’s somewhat grandiose socio-political concerns and instead uses Purist themes and subject matter as a visual springboard for his own aesthetic experiments and interests.

Gently mocking both the style and idealised Romanticism of the Purist movement, Purist Painting with Pitcher, Glass, Classical Column continues Lichtenstein’s appropriation of images from the great painters of art history. 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 stripe and flat colour planes. In doing so, Lichtenstein here ironically questions the reproducible nature of art work and its frequent presentation as masterpieces on mass produced calendars, posters and postcards. By dragging down high art sources to the low levels of media, Lichtenstein’s irreverent approach highlights the inherent artifice of pictorial representation as well as reproduction.

Purist Painting with Pitcher, Glass, Classical Column is the painting in this series that probably owes the most debt to Ozenfant, but crucially Lichtenstein has developed and subtly subverted Ozenfant’s themes to exert his own painterly control. Where Ozenfant would have combined a column and bottle, Lichtenstein separates the two elements, and where Ozenfant would have brought in modernist machine-like elements, Lichtenstein renders the work in such a way that it seems programmed and impersonal. In this emphatically flat composition, forms are established solely by the use of strong colour contrasts and thick lines with two objects often sharing parts of the same black line silhouette, reinforcing the lack of volume or shallow depth in the composition. This completely two-dimensional treatment of the still life brings the flattening of space and simplification of form pioneered by Cézanne to its logical conclusion. Looking to the Purist movement for their aesthetic code as well as to the traditional genres of still life and abstraction, Lichtenstein here amalgamates these vastly different aspects of Western art into this single composition to tackle issues of authorship, style and originality in a post modern world.