Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris
Private Collection, New Jersey
Sotheby's, New York, November 15, 2006, lot 271
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

New York, 65 Thompson Street, Roy Lichtenstein, Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, May - July 1989, cat. no. 28, p. 75, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Salas Nacional y Diego Rivera; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art (as Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture & Drawings); Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; La Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belem, Roy Lichtenstein, Escultura, Pintura y Grafica, July 1998 - August 2000, cat. no. 107, pp. 19 and 156, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash; Zurich, de Pury & Luxembourg, Roy Lichtenstein Brushstrokes: Four Decades, November 2001 - June 2002 (another example exhibited)
Portland Art Museum, Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstroke, October - February 2006 (another example exhibited)

Frederic Tuten, Roy Lichtenstein Sculpture 1976 - 1989, New York, 1989, cat. no. 28, p. 75, illustrated in color

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There are a few scattered areas of minor surface abrasions and unobtrusive pinpoint losses. There is a pinpoint media accretion on the right edge of the figure near the top, presumably from the time of execution.
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Brushstroke Head I’s status as an exemplary work in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre is twofold. It serves as a clear example of Roy Lichtenstein’s fascination with the subject of the female muse and of his desire to identify and isolate the basic language of painting, the brushstroke, thus combining two of Lichtenstein’s most enduring interests. The present work references the female form and in particular the face with its arrangement of brushstrokes to signify the eyes and mouth whilst the bright yellow brushstroke acts as the blonde hair so emblematic of many of Lichtenstein’s depictions of women. The collection of classic Lichtenstein Benday dots doubles as the woman’s freckled skin whilst also alluding to the artist’s interest in the visual language of comics.

Many of Lichtenstein’s most notable pieces spanning throughout his career have demonstrated a keen interest in exploring the storied tradition of the woman as artist’s muse, while also exploring women’s role in a new Pop world. These range from Woman with Flowered Hat from 1963, Sleeping Girl from 1964, Ohhh…Alright…, 1964 to his later work in the 1990s such as Seductive Girl, 1996 and Nude With Red Shirt, 1995. All of these works have achieved records for Lichtenstein and proven to be some of the artist’s most iconic pieces.

Concurrent to his exploration of the art historical phenomenon of the artist’s muse is Lichtenstein’s identification of the brushstroke as the most basic language form in painting. In 1965, Lichtenstein created several important works that treated the brushstroke as the central subject matter in an almost figure-like manner, and Yellow and White Brushstrokes, 1965 is a prime example of this.

Lichtenstein’s paintings of these two traditional aspects of painting in his signature Pop style typify the artist’s desire to conflate the high and the low elements of culture into a single image. As the eminent art historian Hal Foster writes, "The collision of high and low modes is the very strategy of his art, indeed of Pop in general, and here he extends it to sculpture as well: traditional bust meets abstract mannequin, Abstract Expressionist brushstroke meets cartoon sign of the same.  Crucially, however, the reference to traditional genres not only frames this collision, but in doing so, controls it as well." (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, Sculpture, 2005)

In the 1980s, Lichtenstein translated these interests from two dimensional painting to three dimensional sculpture and fused his images of women with those of brushstrokes to create Brushstroke Head I, 1987. This bold and graphic work challenges the methods and notions of visual perception and subvert the illusion of representation all the while maintaining the artist’s playful but important conflation of the boundaries between high and low culture.

Lichtenstein’s technical virtuosity has long been lauded. The rigorous high standards in quality he set himself in his painting remain true in his sculpture. These magnificently executed works are the result of several stages of careful planning. Starting as sketches of imagined forms stimulated by both mass media and art history, Lichtenstein would then build working models and full-scale maquettes. These full-scale maquettes were subsequently used to create the casting molds of sculptures such as Brushstroke Head I, 1987. This piece in particular is a seminal example of two of Lichtenstein’s most enduring interests translated into the third dimension as sculpture.