Roy Lichtenstein

Lawrence Rubin Gallery, Zürich
Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Sale: Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Art, 21 June 2007, Lot 442
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Zürich, Galerie Lawrence Rubin, Roy Lichtenstein: Collagen, 1995, no. 5, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the spots tend more towards a brighter blue in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very small spot of discolouration in the top left hand corner. There are a few scattered media specks in a few places, in keeping with the artist's working process and choice of medium.
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In Collage of Venetian School II, Roy Lichtenstein mischievously elevates the humble Venetian Blind, an everyday item, to the status of art object, one worthy of contemplation and examination. As an off-shoot of the artist’s renowned Interiorsseries, begun in 1990, the title of the current lot is also a playful homage to some of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance, those of the Venetian school, whose ranks included Giorgione and Titian, trailblazers in their own time for experimenting with new painting techniques and previously unprecedented artistic subjects.

The humble bourgeois interior and the myth of domestic bliss has always been a source of fascination for Lichtenstein. From his earliest Pop works, interiors have played a vital role in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre. Seductive commercial images of the modern home interior are transformed into high art paintings, and the present work features Lichtenstein’s signature Benday dots, a technique he first pioneered in the 1960s. Commenting on this recurring motif earlier in his career, Lichtenstein noted that: ‘the dots can have a purely decorative meaning, or they can mean an industrial way of extending the colour, or data information, or finally, that the image is a fake… I think those are the meanings the dots have taken on...’ (Roy Lichtenstein in an interview with J. Coplans in: Roy Lichtenstein: Graphics, Reliefs and Sculpture, 1969-1970, California 1970). His graphic approach to image-making and commercial subject matter play with the idea and meaning of art in our time, dissolving the traditional distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.  In Collage of Venetian School II, Lichtenstein presents a painting which, with its idealised scene, stylised geometric composition and stripped palette, comments on the artifice of painting and the very essence of the practice.