Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 126) (titled Tack)

Bianchini Gallery, New York (titled Tack)

Ira Weissman, Smithtown, Long Island

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the late 1960s

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The work is painted on the reverse of the Plexiglas sheet. There are a few minor, unobtrusive areas of possible wear along the edges, primarily in the upper left and right corners. The sheet of Plexiglas is not mounted and is framed in a metal strip frame under Plexiglas.
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Recognised as the master of graphic clarity and a genius of image appropriation, Roy Lichtenstein redefined the boundary between High and Low art through an ironic interplay of popular culture, everyday objects and fine art. Created in 1964, Insulated Staple, alongside other single-object paintings of the early 1960s, such as Tire (The Museum of Modern Art) and The Grip (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection), are important early examples of Lichtenstein’s pioneering aesthetic, and denote some of the purest and the most fundamental forms of image-making to be found anywhere within the artist’s canon of Pop Masterpieces.

Lichtenstein collected and collated imagery from the plethora of printed sources available to American consumerist society within the economic plenitude of the late 1950s and 1960s – from comic strips, magazines and newspapers to the copious world of print advertising. Insulated Staple features a brilliantly economic rendition of a consumer product – a mundane electrician’s tool – enlarged and exhibited devoid of context. Concisely contoured in bold lines, afloat above a regularised Benday-dotted ground, the magnified form of an insulated staple imposes upon the viewer all the dignities of a still-life and the efficiency of advertising's visual vocabulary. As in most advertising images, the frontal and centralised presentation of a ‘ready-made’ image strips the painting of narrative subject matter or painterly mark-making, yet it allows Lichtenstein to render the act of making art the ultimate subject of his oeuvre: “I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it” (Roy Lichtenstein quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, Madrid, 2007, pp. 118-19). Like Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures or Soup Can Paintings, Lichtenstein’s single-object still-lifes are equally synonymous with the pioneering achievements of Pop Art.

Within Insulated Staple, the artist retained the cartoonist or commercial artist’s means for spatial depth, as in the wide blue bands that denote shading and the blue curves that suggest highlights. Yet the signature Benday dots in uniform blue diminish the volumetric characteristics of the central form. Lichtenstein effectively demonstrates the tension of three-dimensional potential of the staple balanced against the two-dimensionality of the painting surface, in this case a sheet of Plexiglas redolent of the industrial commercialism of the post-war era and a prelude to the enamel on steel works of the mid-1960s. Adding to the effect is the artist's astonishingly streamlined palette. The reduction of his early paintings to black, white and the three primary colours draws inspiration from standardised colours of mechanical printing as well as the chromatic reduction pursued by early modernists such as Piet Mondrian. Lichtenstein often used blue as a substitute for the black of ink-printed advertisements, as illustrated by the example of Insulated Staple. The blue and white, existing within a flattened picture plane, challenges both the natural perception of realism and the boundaries of abstraction. In a 1967 interview Lichtenstein commented on this substitution, which he claimed to have derived from a common practice in commercial art: “I like the idea of blue and white very much because a lot of commercial artists use it to get a free colour. Blue does for black as well; it is an economic thing. So I liked the idea of an apparent economic reason for making one colour work as two colours” (Roy Lichtenstein in conversation with John Coplans in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, 1967, p. 12). Redefining technique, composition and subject, Insulated Staple is a stunning example of the single-object still-lifes that are the essence of Lichtenstein’s work as a ground-breaking innovator of Pop.