羅伊·李奇登斯坦

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #984)
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1984)
Private Collection, Sweden
Sotheby's, New York, November 14, 1991, lot 372A
Private Collection, California (acquired from the above)
Walker Fine Art, New York and San Diego 
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2003

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, October 1984
Chicago, Richard Gray Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Eight New Paintings, October - November 1984, cat. no. 6, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Extremely close inspection reveals an intermittent linear scuff or accretion, located 10 1/4" to 12" from the left edge and 9" down from the top. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a gilt wood frame.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Virtuosic whirls of color resplendently swerve across the surface of Roy Lichtenstein’s ravishing Path Through the Forest of 1984 as if swept in a dramatic whirlwind, creating a dynamic motion that pulls the viewer into its sublime thicket. Exploding in an exquisite panoply of bright confectionery colors, the present work is a magnificently complex milestone in the painter’s ever-evolving exploration of art-making, impeccably summarizing Lichtenstein’s ultimate conceptual project of painting pictures about pictures. The expanse of the canvas erupts into a panorama of Lichtenstein’s most iconic thick bold lines borrowed from the comic strip, and his deceptively expressionistic brush strokes—all in a brilliant chaos that upon close inspection reveals itself as meticulously controlled spontaneity.

Executed at the apex of Lichtenstein’s trailblazing and perennially inventive career, Path Through the Forest reflects Pop Art at its most sophisticated and self-aware. Formally, the painting denotes a fearless departure from the tightly confined representational compositions that characterized Lichtenstein’s earlier oeuvre. Making no attempt toward verisimilitude, instead bold primary hues stand in as symbolic emblems to their most recognizable referents—from green patches that emulate trees, to churning shades of blue that mimic the running water and shifting sky, to brushes of yellow in place of the sun, it is evident from the striking immediacy of the image that Lichtenstein need not strive toward representation in order to communicate the clear picture of the landscape that he wants us to see. 

Lichtenstein’s early re-contextualization of widely circulated mass media images engineered the architectural fabric of Pop imagery, profoundly upsetting the division between “low” and “high” art and toppling the tenuous hierarchies of aesthetic judgment. The artist’s eponymous lexicon of comic-inspired Benday dots, hard graphic lines, and vivid color palette carried into the art history-inspired paintings that Lichtenstein began in the early 1960s, whose interrogation of the canon of “high” art culminated in the present work. Following his comic-book reproductions of masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian, and Picasso, Lichtenstein made paintings of precisely drawn cartoon brushstrokes, enlarged and exaggerated as a sardonic comment on the heroic, gestural handling of paint that epitomized the Abstract Expressionists. Path Through the Forest marks the most sophisticated and visually spellbinding climax of Lichtenstein’s challenge to the distinction between good and bad taste, incorporating the manicured, highly planned strokes of his 1965-66 Brushstroke paintings, while introducing for the first time intersecting brushes of the very same thick, painterly impasto that Lichtenstein satirized.

Upon examination, these seemingly gestural strokes are reduced to small, precise, mechanically applied whisks of paint that are facsimiles of the Abstract Expressionist indulgence for the muscular swoosh, the drip, and the splatter. Asked in 1986 about how the purportedly ‘real’ brushstrokes seem so controlled, Lichtenstein retorted, “It’s because I don’t want it to look like a modulated area. I want it to look like a brushstroke. They don’t all come out that way, but they are supposed to look like instances of the perfect brush stroke.” (the artist cited in BOMB, 14, Winter 1986) Lichtenstein further underscored his piercingly clever visual inventiveness and conceptual sophistication: “It’s taking something that originally was supposed to mean immediacy and I’m tediously drawing something that looks like a brushstroke…I want it to look as though it were painstaking. It’s a picture of a picture really and it’s a misconstrued picture of a picture.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago (and travelling), Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, 2012, p. 50)

For the Pop Artists of Lichtenstein’s generation, the overwhelming shadows of their Abstract Expressionist forebears loomed over them like deities, inspiring admiration and reverence, in addition to imposing a celebrated standard of accepted style. Lichtenstein countered this stifling climate by suggesting the heroic allover brushwork of Abstract Expressionism as having lost its avant-garde status. By the 1960s, the macho style of abstraction permeated the public's cultural lexicon to such an extent that it could be likened to the consumer mass media advertisements and comic strips that served as the artist’s initial Pop Art source material: “Far from continuing to shock the bourgeoisie, Abstract Expressionism has made its way into the average American home: ‘Once the hurdle of its non-objectivity is overcome, A-E is as prone to be decorative as French Impressionism.’ Shortly thereafter, Lichtenstein featured in a Life pictorial in which he was portrayed as an anti-Pollock, his mechanical style of reproducing his comic-book sources implicitly contrasted with Pollock’s frenzied creativity” (James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff in Exh. Cat., Chicago, Ibid., p. 49)

The present work riffs not only on Abstract Expressionism, but on the oft clichéd genre of landscape painting. Inverting a landscape picture’s representational goal of pulling the viewer into its pastoral reality, Lichtenstein’s rendering provides no one clear vantage point—our eyes dart across the vibrant surface, which possesses the ineffable motion and speed of a hard-edged Futurist composition by Giacomo Balla fused with de Kooning’s characteristic brushy, all-over confluence of figuration and abstraction. In painting a landscape through the same aesthetic iconography as his comic-strip paintings and art history paintings, Lichtenstein puts Van Gogh and Dufy on the same level as a comic strip or advertisement, convincingly melding the high and the low as only he could accomplish. What is refreshingly invigorating about looking at a Lichtenstein such as the present work is a stunning lack of iconoclasm—he parodied, satirized, and critically examined, but at the very heart of Lichtenstein’s painting is a true admiration and indefatigable ardor for all pictures. He reveled in the visual pleasure of our image-swollen society; his work is punchy and ironic, but never mean-spirited. He was an enthusiast of the highest order. Magnificent in its ambition and formal vigor, Path Through the Forest vividly lays bare the terms of its own making and embodies Lichtenstein’s most compelling subject matter—art itself.