Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #702)
Ace Gallery, Vancouver and Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1975

With his Entablature paintings, Roy Lichtenstein created one of his most refined graphic series.  Considered predominantly as a Pop artist in the 1960s, Lichtenstein ventured down a new path with this series that allied him more closely with minimal art and color field abstraction.  Lichtenstein moved away from popular images and towards more neutral subjects.  In addition to the Entablatures, Lichtenstein also focused on landscapes and his Brushwork paintings.  In Entablature from 1975, it is clear that Lichtenstein has retained some of the elements of his Pop cartoon style, such as thick black outlines, however the image itself is taken from art history and Greek architecture in particular.

Lichtenstein began working on his Entablatures in 1971 and created two sets of these paintings.  The original series was executed in black and white and emerged from Lichtenstein's earlier works, such as Temple of Apollo, from 1964.  The present work is one of the eighteen paintings in the second set of Entablatures, in which Lichtenstein expanded his palette to include more vibrant colors and diminished the use of Benday dots.  Entablature is an excellent example of the artist’s interest in creating new textures by incorporating sand and mica into his paint to create textures that relate to actual building materials.  Lichtenstein studied a variety of sources on classical architecture in addition to photographing a number of buildings in the financial district of Manhattan.  In the present work, Lichtenstein stays true to the classical model yet within a reductive style of extreme simplification in line and shape. 

By turning entablatures into color-field landscapes, Lichtenstein creates stark, strong geometric surfaces.  The canvas remains mainly unadulterated, punctuated only by strips of pattern and color that push the structure out of the picture plane and emphasize the flat surface of the work.  Entablature from 1975 is a visually exciting example of Lichtenstein’s new refinement of curvilinear patterns as he isolates architectural ornament to create one of his most technically complex and sophisticated graphic series.