Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 839)
Private Collection, Texas
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1988

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Recent Paintings, 1979

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the maroons tend more towards red and the overall tonality is much brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are several very faint stain spots and a small vertical drip mark towards the bottom left edge, in the white. There are several scattered media accretions in the lower half of the vertical eye and several media accretions in the vertical yellow line to the right. There is a minute media accretion to the tip of the bird's beak. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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With his world-renowned and instantly recognisable visual dialect of bold lines, block colour and, of course, Benday dots, Roy Lichtenstein's Two Figures, Indian is a monumental testament to his historic brand of Pop Art. At once reverential to its subject and confrontational to the viewer, this large-scale, mature Lichtenstein masterwork embodies the thread of post-Modern image appropriation that runs throughout his oeuvre. The composition's imagery is loosely based on Native American motifs, exemplifying a body of work that he created on this theme between 1979 and 1981. Indeed, by enlisting the legacy of Native American visual culture and investigating the possibilities resident in earlier art forms Lichtenstein delivers a striking paragon in the history of appropriation in art.

As with his 1960s imagery derived from comics, Lichtenstein here employs the pictorial language of mass communication, founded on the economy of line and visual clout, and wedded to modes of mechanical reproduction. Indeed, Two Figures, Indian incorporates the hard graphic edge, bold pattern, and pared-down, high-colour Pop syntax that is so archetypal of Lichtenstein's most famous works in order to present a highly energised composition. The organic forms and diverse media of Lichtenstein's various Native American source materials are reduced to an insistently flat amalgam of black lines and the primaries red, blue and yellow, and grey and white. Here the artist does not depend on one single source but multiple; each intuitively modified and combined to present an inimitable composition. Lichtenstein does not indulge in rote duplication of his source images, but manipulates, reorganises and reframes the stacked-up geometric elements. Amid the painting's consequently complex architecture, the viewer's eye roams from point to point, finding it difficult to establish a focus or sense of perspective.

Two Figures, Indian also pushes the semiotic parameters of aesthetic communication, implying signifiers and referents of wide-ranging cultural histories. In fact the precise sources of his Native American infatuation were diverse and comparatively indiscriminate, spanning iconographical traditions of the Navajo Native Americans, Acoma and Zuni Pueblos of New Mexico, and Southwestern American pottery. The painting is interspersed with symbols of implied figuration – a human eye; an eagle's beak; brightly coloured feathers – that collectively exploit the populist idea of a visual culture rather than adhering to specific reference or historical accuracy. As participant in the presumptions of Lichtenstein's visual communication the viewer contributes to a discourse on the power of popular and associative iconographic signs.

Not only is Lichtenstein reducing forms and figures to their most elemental components but his geometric composition and vibrant patterning can also be seen as a contemporary interpretation of the work of the greats of the early Twentieth Century such as Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. Fascinated with a wide variety of Modernist ideologies, Lichtenstein's work also invokes bold designs from Art Deco ornamentation of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In fact, Lichtenstein's painting from Native American imagery followed his works of the mid 1970s that were directly inspired by Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism. In this context Two Figures, Indian marks the climactic summation of his previous appropriation of art historical precedent. Stylistically, the fractures of Modernist and Cubist composition found a strong synergy and compatibility with Lichtenstein's graphic techniques, his works balancing active and disrupted compositions with clear patterns and textures. Indeed, describing the inspiration for his paintings, the artist once stated, "I think the aesthetic influence on me is probably more Cubism than anything. I think even the cartoons themselves are influenced by Cubism, because the hard-edged character which is brought about by the printing creates a kind of cubist look that perhaps wasn't intended" (the artist cited in: Anthony d'Offay, Ed., Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein interviewed by David Sylvester in 1966 and 1997, London, 1997, p. 7).

Furthermore, the identifiable motifs of Two Figures, Indian resonate in uncanny parallel with the dreamlike, ephemeral iconography of Surrealists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy. For instance, the eye was a symbolic and poetically loaded motif favoured by the Surrealists, particularly Dalí, as well as being reminiscent of Lichtenstein's own dewy-eyed heroines in his comic strip paintings such as the iconic Happy Tears of 1964. Just as Surrealism sought to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their quotidian significance and radically re-presenting them in new and unlikely contexts, so here Lichtenstein employs non sequitur juxtapositions and myriad iconographies to investigate the stimulants of visual perception and cognition.

By citing earlier artistic precedent Lichtenstein questions notions of originality and authorship in art. This was a current topic at the time: in 1978 the Whitney Museum of American Art had staged a survey exhibition Art About Art, organised by Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, which investigated the widespread parody and appropriation of history of art icons by artists since 1950. Needless to say, Lichtenstein was well represented in the exhibition. Dramatically prefiguring the post-Modern passion for appropriation that characterised the art of the 1980s, Two Figures, Indian encapsulates both Lichtenstein's referential contribution to and self-conscious continuation of Art History. Finally, Two Figures, Indian serves as the Pop Art archetype, recasting the historical in prefabricated means of communication, thereby referencing the culture of reproduction that is so necessary to the global dissemination of an artist's work, including Lichtenstein's own.