Roy Lichtenstein

Pace Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1999

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the yellow is much brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals two minute fly spots to the centre of the lamp shade and another to the top left outer edge of the window. Adjacent to this is an extremely fine and faint hairline crack. There are a few superficial handling marks in places to the white pigment of the top edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Forming an important part of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most significant late bodies of work, Interior with Painting of Trees superbly distills the quintessence of the artist’s career-long investigation into the theme of consumer-driven household domesticity. The depiction of interiors had preoccupied Lichtenstein throughout his career, and his decision to re-engage with the topic on an extensive level during the 1990s reveals the importance the artist attached to the inquiry. From his earliest Pop works, interiors had played a vital role, enabling the artist to investigate and examine the concepts of fast changing bourgeois tastes and the ever increasing power of a consumer driven economy. The artist’s first interior painting, Bathroom from 1961 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), belongs to his black and white period. Derived primarily from contemporary newspaper advertisements these early works encapsulated the dramatic social and cultural transformations of the 1950s and 1960s; a period of change in landscape of high art production when Lichtenstein and his fellow Pop artists were embarking on a complex exploration of new methods, subjects, and testing creative boundaries. Compared to this early work, Interior with Painting of Trees and other examples of the late Interiors are vibrantly coloured and imbued with an updated compositional complexity and technique. By the time the artist returned to the theme in the 1990s, his effervescent Pop dialectic had attained legendary heights, so that the later Interiors serve as highly developed re-capitulations of his earlier aesthetic investigations. With comparable works housed in the collections of major museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the present work stands as a consummate example from Lichtenstein’s great late series.

Lichtenstein depicts an interior without signs of human habitation: glossily perfect in its lack of any form of disorder or untidiness. Despite the absence of discarded reading material or other accoutrements of everyday life, the elegantly arranged fruit bowl atop the central table and the plant beneath the painting suggests consideration has been applied to the arrangement of the furniture and the room’s appearance. The overall impression is one of comfortable, bourgeois domesticity, yet there is an element of wry humour underlining the almost surreal perfection of the scene.  Robert Fitzpatrick has noted that Lichtenstein’s late interiors effectively act as spoofs of the glossy ‘house and home’ spreads that feature in high-end magazines: “His interior works… bristle with irony and humour. As the first large body of work that Lichtenstein started in the 1990s, the interiors caricatured the excessive 1980s documented in colourful spreads of art-filled interiors in magazines like Architectural Digest” (Robert Fitzpatrick, ‘Perfect Pictures’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors, 1999, p. 13).

In its celebration of comfortable consumerism, Interior with Painting of Trees and other works within the series recall Richard Hamilton’s seminal collage of 1956, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Considered one of the earliest manifestations of Pop Art, Hamilton’s prophetic collage depicts an interior awash with the latest ‘must-have’ appliances for the ideal home and infused with the over-inflated desires and beauty stereotypes propagated by consumer culture. Lichtenstein’s late interiors present a similarly ‘idealised’ version of daily life in the modern home updated for the 1990s: the flashy, synthetic colour scheme sardonically perpetuates the excessive inflation of consumer dreams first acknowledged as part of the USA’s turbo-economy following World War II. Cassandra Lozano argues that this concept of the distillation of consumer culture reaches its apogee within this series: “The interior paintings portray upper middle-class living rooms overstuffed with furniture and fine art of uncertain provenance. The consumer society that Lichtenstein depicted in his Pop paintings of the sixties became, in his nineties interiors, a world of consumer excess” (Cassandra Lozano, ‘Words and Pictures’ in: ibid., p. 26).

Impressive in scale, Lichtenstein recalled that the large size of Interior with Painting of Trees and other works within the series was highly deliberate: “We wanted those interiors to be large, so they would make you feel as though you could walk into them, but they’re so stylised that you obviously don’t think it’s reality, but when you make it about life size, something peculiar happens when you stand in front of an interior” (Roy Lichtenstein in conversation with David Sylvester in 1997 in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Some Kind of Reality, 1997, p. 36). Ultimately in its masterful exposition of Lichtenstein’s mature style and technique, Interior with Painting of Trees is a superb example of one of the artist’s most important and accomplished later bodies of work.