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Property from a Private American Collection
ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Modern Painting with Ionic Column
细节
ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Modern Painting with Ionic Column
signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ‘67’ (on the reverse)
acrylic, oil and graphite on canvas
62 x 82 1/8 in. (157.5 x 208.6 cm.)
Painted in 1967.
Modern Painting with Ionic Column
signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ‘67’ (on the reverse)
acrylic, oil and graphite on canvas
62 x 82 1/8 in. (157.5 x 208.6 cm.)
Painted in 1967.
来源
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Gardner and Jan Cowles, New York, 1968
Richard Benedek, New York
Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London, circa 1974
Anon. sale; Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 18 May 1978, lot 267
Private collection
Private collection, by descent from the above, 2007
Private collection, Beverly Hills
Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Gardner and Jan Cowles, New York, 1968
Richard Benedek, New York
Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London, circa 1974
Anon. sale; Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 18 May 1978, lot 267
Private collection
Private collection, by descent from the above, 2007
Private collection, Beverly Hills
Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
出版
V. Lawford, “A Reflection of Now: Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Cowles’s New York Apartment Brilliantly Mirrors Today’s Surge for Nonstop Space,” Vogue, vol. 158, no. 6, 1 October 1971, pp. 182 and 184 (illustrated).
J. Coplans, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 149, no. VIII (illustrated).
Roy Lichtenstein: Modern Paintings, exh. cat., New York, Richard Gray Gallery, 2010, pp. 30-31, no. 34 (illustrated).
Lichtenstein: Kunst als Motiv, exh. cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig, 2010, p. 180, no. S 178 (illustrated).
Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art, exh. cat., Milan Triennale, 2010, p. 180 (illustrated).
A. Theil, Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné, digital, ongoing, no. RLCR 1398 (illustrated).
J. Coplans, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 149, no. VIII (illustrated).
Roy Lichtenstein: Modern Paintings, exh. cat., New York, Richard Gray Gallery, 2010, pp. 30-31, no. 34 (illustrated).
Lichtenstein: Kunst als Motiv, exh. cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig, 2010, p. 180, no. S 178 (illustrated).
Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art, exh. cat., Milan Triennale, 2010, p. 180 (illustrated).
A. Theil, Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné, digital, ongoing, no. RLCR 1398 (illustrated).
展览
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, December 1967-February 1968, p. 10, no. 80.
Cleveland, New Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Major Works – Graphics – Posters, February-March 1969.
Stuttgart, Fischer Fine Art Ltd, Paintings by Colville, Lichtenstein and Linder, October 1974, pp. 6 and 12, no. 5 (illustrated).
Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Roy Lichtenstein: The Modern Work, 1965-1970, November-December 1978.
Cleveland, New Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Major Works – Graphics – Posters, February-March 1969.
Stuttgart, Fischer Fine Art Ltd, Paintings by Colville, Lichtenstein and Linder, October 1974, pp. 6 and 12, no. 5 (illustrated).
Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Roy Lichtenstein: The Modern Work, 1965-1970, November-December 1978.
更多详情
“Pop art [is], by and large, an art of quotations, translations, imitations, double takes.” Roy Lichtenstein
A heroic painting from the 1960s, whose visual inventiveness rivals his best work, Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Painting with Ionic Column is a Pop Art work of genius where the history of Western art collides with the Art Deco motifs of an Industrial Age and the Classical architecture of Ancient Greece. In 1967, Lichtenstein expanded the parameters of his Pop Art vernacular to come face-to-face with the illustrious history of modern art. Broadening both his scope and ambition, the celebrated Pop artist now tackled the great “isms” of the Western canon. He called this series “Modern Paintings.” In the present example,, Lichtenstein references Art Deco, Greek Architecture, Cubism, Futurism and Purism, proving that, as critic Dave Hickey explained, “art history flows any way it wants to: forward, backward, or to the side” (D. Hickey, Roy Lichtenstein: Modern Paintings, exh. cat., Richard Gray Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 12). These beloved paintings proved to be some of his most radical and groundbreaking to date, with examples now found in prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
A ceaseless innovator whose work continues to represent the very pinnacle of American Pop Art painting, Roy Lichtenstein, in the mid-to-late 1960s, expanded his visual repertoire beyond comic-book heroines to enter into the realm of High Art. With the improvisational flair of a jazz musician, Lichtenstein riffs off Western culture in the present work. Proceeding from left to right, he begins with the Ancient Greeks and their eternal quest for balance and harmony, which is represented by an Ionic column and artist’s palette. In the center panel, we encounter the fractured pictorial planes of Cubism, with a red circle and a field of benday dots possibly representing Picasso’s guitar. Three puffy clouds in the upper register evoke a blue sky, but these are now flattened into geometric shapes and “shaded” with benday dots. Along the right edge we find the Art Deco style of the Industrial Age, where the stylized depiction of a mighty steam ship sets a course for an epic collision between past, present and future.
As the art critic Lawrence Alloway noted, Lichtenstein’s work at this time “can do two things – it can switch a comic book into fine art, or it can switch fine art into comic style” (L. Alloway, "On Style: An Examination of Roy Lichtenstein's Development Despite a New Monograph on the Artist," Artforum, March 1972, p. 54). Indeed, for Lichtenstein, the Western art historical canon was not meant to be opined over or lauded. Instead, it’s simply grist for the mill. This proved to be a rewarding and fertile enterprise for the artist, as the subject of “Art History” would continue to fascinate him well into the 1970s and ‘80s. During that time, Lichtenstein created thought-provoking and original paintings using just a modicum of means, typically limiting his palette–as he does in the present work–to primary colors, benday dots and raking diagonal lines. In his paintings that referenced Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Still Life painting, Lichtenstein reminds us that “Pop art [is], by and large, an art of quotations, translations, imitations, double takes" (L. Alloway, Ibid., pp. 54-55).
The impetus for the Modern Paintings dates to the summer of 1966, when Lichtenstein was asked to design a poster for Lincoln Center. He took as his inspiration the Art Deco architecture of 1920s and ‘30s New York, which he simplified and exaggerated, limiting his palette to primary colors, Ben-Day dots and featuring the same comic-book style of the earlier ‘60s. The artist perceived the many layers of reference already encoded in the Art Deco style, which he humorously referred to as “Cubism for the Home.” The clean, sleek look of Art Deco came to symbolize New York as a modern metropolis, characterized by stylized zigzags, chevrons and geometric shapes. However, Lichtenstein noted that “The sensibility that I’m trying to bring is apparent anti-sensibility. I think that’s the important part of it! It’s a modern sensibility. Instead of…the European sensibility, I’m using flat areas of color opposed to dotted areas, which imitate Benday dots in printing and become industrialized textures…but it’s a modern industrial texture and it’s not one that is nostalgic or refers back to European painting... It has its own mode, its own sensibility” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. Mercurio, Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art, exh. cat., Milan Triennale, 2010, p. 85).
These epic and masterful “Modern” paintings reward the spectator’s time in close looking, often revealing Lichtenstein’s sly and clever sleight of hand. Particularly in the present work, Lichtenstein uses a variety of artistic shorthand devices. His dots lend a three-dimensional modeling and roundness to the things they depict, but they are also used arbitrarily, as in the artist’s palette at left, which thereby flips the relationship between the foreground and background into a flickering back-and-forth where none of the imagery is what it seems. The canvas is divided into five relatively equal diagonal segments, with the black and white diagonals representing shafts of light, the fretboard of a guitar, or the upper deck of a steamship. It is as if the entire history of Western Art, from the Greeks to the Modern Age, have been passed through a Pop Art prism, so that the viewer is left with colorful, fractured shards, revealing imagery that Dave Hickey described as “up for grabs” (D. Hickey, op. cit., p. 10).
The Modern Paintings corresponded to a period of increasing international acclaim. In 1966, Lichtenstein was selected as one of five artists chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. The following year, he was given his first European retrospective, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He was also included in the 1967 “Whitney Annual” (now known as the Whitney Biennial), where Modern Painting with Ionic Column debuted to the art-going public in December of 1967.
Lichtenstein often worked from reproductions and photographs that would have appeared in newspapers and magazines. He sampled freely from all areas of art history, and his deliberately flat style calls to mind the inherent flatness of the pictorial plane, and the fact that all representative art is in fact a false presentation meant to mimic the look of the real thing. He also understood the way in which the most radical and progressive artistic movements ultimately became co-opted, a watered-down pastiche of the real thing. “Our architecture is not van der Rohe, it’s really McDonalds,” he once said (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, p. 64). Indeed, Lichtenstein seems to remind us, time and again, that his ultimate subject matter was not the comic book or Janson’s "History of Art." Rather, it was the very act of artmaking itself, and he therefore–with characteristic tongue-in-cheek glee–inserted himself into the very canon that he once sought to disrupt.
A heroic painting from the 1960s, whose visual inventiveness rivals his best work, Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Painting with Ionic Column is a Pop Art work of genius where the history of Western art collides with the Art Deco motifs of an Industrial Age and the Classical architecture of Ancient Greece. In 1967, Lichtenstein expanded the parameters of his Pop Art vernacular to come face-to-face with the illustrious history of modern art. Broadening both his scope and ambition, the celebrated Pop artist now tackled the great “isms” of the Western canon. He called this series “Modern Paintings.” In the present example,, Lichtenstein references Art Deco, Greek Architecture, Cubism, Futurism and Purism, proving that, as critic Dave Hickey explained, “art history flows any way it wants to: forward, backward, or to the side” (D. Hickey, Roy Lichtenstein: Modern Paintings, exh. cat., Richard Gray Gallery, New York, 2010, p. 12). These beloved paintings proved to be some of his most radical and groundbreaking to date, with examples now found in prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
A ceaseless innovator whose work continues to represent the very pinnacle of American Pop Art painting, Roy Lichtenstein, in the mid-to-late 1960s, expanded his visual repertoire beyond comic-book heroines to enter into the realm of High Art. With the improvisational flair of a jazz musician, Lichtenstein riffs off Western culture in the present work. Proceeding from left to right, he begins with the Ancient Greeks and their eternal quest for balance and harmony, which is represented by an Ionic column and artist’s palette. In the center panel, we encounter the fractured pictorial planes of Cubism, with a red circle and a field of benday dots possibly representing Picasso’s guitar. Three puffy clouds in the upper register evoke a blue sky, but these are now flattened into geometric shapes and “shaded” with benday dots. Along the right edge we find the Art Deco style of the Industrial Age, where the stylized depiction of a mighty steam ship sets a course for an epic collision between past, present and future.
As the art critic Lawrence Alloway noted, Lichtenstein’s work at this time “can do two things – it can switch a comic book into fine art, or it can switch fine art into comic style” (L. Alloway, "On Style: An Examination of Roy Lichtenstein's Development Despite a New Monograph on the Artist," Artforum, March 1972, p. 54). Indeed, for Lichtenstein, the Western art historical canon was not meant to be opined over or lauded. Instead, it’s simply grist for the mill. This proved to be a rewarding and fertile enterprise for the artist, as the subject of “Art History” would continue to fascinate him well into the 1970s and ‘80s. During that time, Lichtenstein created thought-provoking and original paintings using just a modicum of means, typically limiting his palette–as he does in the present work–to primary colors, benday dots and raking diagonal lines. In his paintings that referenced Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Still Life painting, Lichtenstein reminds us that “Pop art [is], by and large, an art of quotations, translations, imitations, double takes" (L. Alloway, Ibid., pp. 54-55).
The impetus for the Modern Paintings dates to the summer of 1966, when Lichtenstein was asked to design a poster for Lincoln Center. He took as his inspiration the Art Deco architecture of 1920s and ‘30s New York, which he simplified and exaggerated, limiting his palette to primary colors, Ben-Day dots and featuring the same comic-book style of the earlier ‘60s. The artist perceived the many layers of reference already encoded in the Art Deco style, which he humorously referred to as “Cubism for the Home.” The clean, sleek look of Art Deco came to symbolize New York as a modern metropolis, characterized by stylized zigzags, chevrons and geometric shapes. However, Lichtenstein noted that “The sensibility that I’m trying to bring is apparent anti-sensibility. I think that’s the important part of it! It’s a modern sensibility. Instead of…the European sensibility, I’m using flat areas of color opposed to dotted areas, which imitate Benday dots in printing and become industrialized textures…but it’s a modern industrial texture and it’s not one that is nostalgic or refers back to European painting... It has its own mode, its own sensibility” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. Mercurio, Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art, exh. cat., Milan Triennale, 2010, p. 85).
These epic and masterful “Modern” paintings reward the spectator’s time in close looking, often revealing Lichtenstein’s sly and clever sleight of hand. Particularly in the present work, Lichtenstein uses a variety of artistic shorthand devices. His dots lend a three-dimensional modeling and roundness to the things they depict, but they are also used arbitrarily, as in the artist’s palette at left, which thereby flips the relationship between the foreground and background into a flickering back-and-forth where none of the imagery is what it seems. The canvas is divided into five relatively equal diagonal segments, with the black and white diagonals representing shafts of light, the fretboard of a guitar, or the upper deck of a steamship. It is as if the entire history of Western Art, from the Greeks to the Modern Age, have been passed through a Pop Art prism, so that the viewer is left with colorful, fractured shards, revealing imagery that Dave Hickey described as “up for grabs” (D. Hickey, op. cit., p. 10).
The Modern Paintings corresponded to a period of increasing international acclaim. In 1966, Lichtenstein was selected as one of five artists chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. The following year, he was given his first European retrospective, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He was also included in the 1967 “Whitney Annual” (now known as the Whitney Biennial), where Modern Painting with Ionic Column debuted to the art-going public in December of 1967.
Lichtenstein often worked from reproductions and photographs that would have appeared in newspapers and magazines. He sampled freely from all areas of art history, and his deliberately flat style calls to mind the inherent flatness of the pictorial plane, and the fact that all representative art is in fact a false presentation meant to mimic the look of the real thing. He also understood the way in which the most radical and progressive artistic movements ultimately became co-opted, a watered-down pastiche of the real thing. “Our architecture is not van der Rohe, it’s really McDonalds,” he once said (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, p. 64). Indeed, Lichtenstein seems to remind us, time and again, that his ultimate subject matter was not the comic book or Janson’s "History of Art." Rather, it was the very act of artmaking itself, and he therefore–with characteristic tongue-in-cheek glee–inserted himself into the very canon that he once sought to disrupt.
荣誉呈献
Emily Kaplan
Senior Vice President, Senior Specialist, Co-Head of 20th Century Evening Sale