Roy Lichtenstein

Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Stockholm, Heland Wetterling Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Imperfect, October - November 1988, p. 11, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
St. Louis, The Greenberg Gallery, Sculpture 1960's-1980's, March - April 1989 (another example exhibited)
New York, 65 Thompson Street, Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, May - July 1989, no. 30, pp. 78-79, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Faces and Figures, June - July 1993 (another example exhibited)
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Salas Nacional y Diego Rivera; Monterrey, Museo De Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; La Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belem, Roy Lichtenstein: Sculptures and Drawings, July 1998 - August 2000, no. 106, pp. 59 and 155, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

Brooks Adams, "Roy Lichtenstein's Interiors." Atelier, Tokyo, no. 784, June 1992, p. 16, illustrated in color

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There is some evidence of light wear and handling and some minor surface abrasions.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Roy Lichtenstein's art has become synonymous with the Pop Art movement's focus on easily digestible visual material and a co-option of contemporary culture to "high" art.  Spurning some of the more grandiloquent ambitions of the Abstract Expressionists, Lichtenstein did maintain a particular focus on the immediacy and flatness of his work, both in painting and in sculpture.  Brushstroke Head III of 1987 is an archetypal sculpture by the artist in its insistence on its own two-dimensionality despite being worked in the round.  Relying on the same primary color palette which permeates his oeuvre, Lichtenstein creates a playful graphic of the abstracted head.  The strong outlining and use of the Ben-Day dots relates the work back to the artist's more famous cartoon paintings, but does so with a particularly interesting perversion of the form.  Lichtenstein took more liberty with his sculpture even while remaining truer to the source material in his paintings. 

The sketchiness of this work is arresting in its abstraction and levity. Lichtenstein has co-opted the gestural subjectivity of the Expressionists in support of a more objective Pop functionality.  The piece manages to be both painting and sculpture, and he approaches the latter medium with the same intent fixation on the "pictorial" as he brought to the former.  Utilizing the same elements of abstraction and flatness, illusion and figuration he has again altered the nature of the medium, just as he would continue to do with painting.