Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 857)
Private Collection, Texas
Greenberg Van Doren, New York
Private Collection, New York
Private Collection, Florida

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Group Show, May 1980

Brook S. Mason, "Principals of Design", Art and Auction, May 2003, p. 86, illustrated in color (installation photograph)
"New York, Decor: European Furniture and Decoration", Christie's Magazine, June 15, 2005, p. 198, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Milan, Museo Triennale, Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations, 2010, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The painting is framed in a black wood strip frame.
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Expressionist Head from 1980 emerges at the end of an important period of creativity for Roy Lichtenstein. In the 1970s, the artist shifted his attention away from the comic and advertising inspired paintings of the 1960s which had established him as a star in the Pop art movement. Lichtenstein now turned to the nature of painting itself by contemplating the great artists and movements of the 20^th century. The works executed between 1974 and 1980 engage with the dynamics and mechanics of Futurism, Surrealism, and German Expressionism. With bold line and vivid color, Lichtenstein created a unique style that combined the Pop aesthetic with techniques of the past resulting in works that herald his ultimate subject: art about art. Many avant-garde and Modernist movements earlier in the century had derided traditional genres such as nudes, landscapes, and narrative painting. Yet as the century progressed, most artists acknowledged that the subject matter of figurative and landscape art never completely disappears from aesthetic considerations, and the dialect between the subject of art and the techniques of art was nowhere more thoroughly explored than in Lichtenstein's oeuvre. In Expressionist Head, the inspiration from both a former genre (portraits) and style (German Expressionism) has led Lichtenstein to an even more boldly graphic technique and an extraordinarily powerful composition.

The most inventive and intellectual artists know that the investigation of the past can lead to the most enlightened and liberating innovations of the present: "[Lichtenstein's] claim about the images of art history was that many of them stand out so strongly that they have imprinted themselves in our minds as a kind of artistic logo, just as particular genres and subjects have: still lifes, landscapes, pictures from the artist's studio, and so on" (Exh. Cat., Humelbaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, 2003. p. 6). Though perhaps most famous for his Ben-Day dot comic paintings from the 1960s, Lichtenstein cemented his place in the trajectory of the art historical canon with these referential works from the 1970s to 1980: "he confirms with his paraphrases of the works of other artists that history lies like a kind of cultural DNA in us.  ...Lichtenstein's images from the history of art are images of the history of art" (ibid. p 15).

For the present work, Lichtenstein turned to Conrad Felixmüller, one of the most important members of the "second generation" of German Expressionist artists to emerge after World War I. The image for Expressionist Head was sourced from Felixmüller's Depressed in the Studio, a 1917 woodcut print that illustrated the cover of the catalogue for a German Expressionism show at the University of Houston in 1977 which remains in Lichtenstein's archives.  In keeping with his Pop art aesthetic, Lichtenstein's art-related sources were not the paintings or prints themselves, but rather illustrations from exhibition catalogues, artist monographs or posters. Beginning with his homages to Picasso in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein's technique and style in Femme d'Algers 1963 was meant to mimic the mass reproductions and not the actual work that Picasso had painted only eight years before in 1955. Diane Waldman cites another intriguing note which illuminates Lichtenstein's response to early 1960s criticism of Pop art as dependent on borrowing imagery rather than creating it. "[Femme d'Algers, 1963] is also a tongue-in-cheek comment on Picasso and his appropriation of Eugène Delacroix's Femme d'Alger, 1834. The issue of intention is critical here, for Picasso's version of Delacroix's Femme d'Alger and Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863 – which is a variation on Giorgione's Tempest, 1505-10, which itself is based on other sources ...are themselves interpretations of earlier versions of the subject."  Moreover, "Lichtenstein does not wish to submerge the original source for the Picasso; he wishes to identify it and, in so doing, comment on the artist and his particular style." (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Roy Lichtenstein, 1993, p. 37)

By the 1970s, Lichtenstein's art sources were far-ranging. In this case, Conrad Felixmüller attended the Dresden School of Applied Arts and the Dresden Art Academy from 1911 to 1915.  Between 1915 and 1926, he worked as a freelance artist, his drawings and prints appearing in avant-garde magazines such as Der Stürm and Die Aktion.  As an Expressionist artist, he was reviled by the Nazis who included his works in the 1933 and 1937 German exhibits of 'degenerate' art. Felixmüller's Depressed in the Studio places the self-portrait head close to the picture plane, dominating the composition.  The unfurling facets of the head, shown simultaneously in profile and full-face, echo the style of Cubism, presenting multiple view-points at once through a collage-like assemblage of planar elements.  The strong lines, typical of the wood-block carvings, energize the cerebral and hermetic Cubist presentation with a visceral power typical of German Expressionism, which "gave twentieth-century art a new artistic language, imparting an intense psychological expression to painting through the use of distorted forms, jagged lines, and violent colors" (Ibid. p. 251).

Visually, both the Expressionist movement and the woodblock technique would pair perfectly with Lichtenstein's reductive aesthetic and compositional awareness. In Expressionist Head, Lichtenstein's usual palette of red, yellow, blue, black, and white portrays a geometric face of predominantly sharp angles and bold lines. Lichtenstein's signature use of Benday dots gradually became less predominant and the thick contour lines, as well as striped diagonals and cartoonish wood grains, came to the fore as Lichtenstein's tool of choice in organizing space and form.  As with Felixmüller and the other German Expressionists, Lichtenstein's composition presses forward to the two-dimensional picture plane and any sense of depth is intuitive. In the case of Expressionist Head, the hands framing the face imply a three-dimensional posture, while the direction of the individual eyes hint at shifting perspectives for the head.

As Edward Lucie-Smith writes, "Roy Lichtenstein was the master of the stereotype, and the most sophisticated of the major Pop artists in terms of his analysis of visual convention and his ironic exploitation of past styles" (E. Lucie-Smith Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists, London, 1999). Multiple art historical tropes and knowing appropriations are synthesized in a single canvas, including the traditional genre of portraiture and self-portraiture. Female and male heads were Lichtenstein's favored motif in the German Expressionist series, signaling the key role this genre played throughout art history. Even Modernist artists such as Picasso dealt with the question of the self-image in art, and the influence of paintings such as Picasso's 1907 Self-Portrait, with its almond-shaped eyes and skewed planar face that fill the canvas would have filtered through movements such as German Expressionism and thus into Lichtenstein's oeuvre.

Arguably, the inspiration Lichtenstein tapped from German Expressionism and Cubism was purely aesthetic. Lichtenstein was interested in the art itself and not what it revealed about the artistic or social tenor of its time. Absent from Expressionist Head is German Expressionism's "emotional intensity, psychological meaning, and commitment to political expression... As he did with Futurism and Surrealism, Lichtenstein was more interested in capturing the movement's fundamental pictorial aspects than in probing its underlying beliefs and ideologies". (Ibid., p. 253)  Instead, with Lichtenstein's signature primary colors and meticulous technical skill, Expressionist Head exemplifies his ability to translate motifs of modern art into his own idiosyncratic vocabulary. He brings important artists, including himself, down from their fine art plinths and breathes new life into the commonly reproduced icons of the past, reanimating aesthetic clichés, and placing them lovingly back on rarefied museum walls.