U nique works of art separated by more than two decades, these two superb collages present us with the full range of Lichtenstein’s formal and thematic concerns. The work from 1973, Still Life with Picasso (Study) was preliminary to the pulling of a silkscreen print; that from 1995, Nude with Bust (Study), was the basis for a painting. Both works are variations on the time-honored subject of the artist’s studio, familiar to us from Rembrandt, Courbet and, among many other artists, Pablo Picasso. One of the Spaniard’s portraits of Dora Maar, from the mid-1930s (drained of color, a black-and-white reversed version) [fig. 1] looms in the background of Lichtenstein’s collage from 1973, behind a table-top arrangement of grapes and bananas, and alongside a pitcher containing paintbrushes, identifying this as a painter’s workplace. The print that resulted from this collage was included in a portfolio, Hommage à Picasso, produced in Berlin and Rome the year of Picasso’s death, with works by, among others, Max Bill, Jim Dine, Henry Moore, and Robert Motherwell. Of course, this might just as well be a representation of Lichtenstein’s own studio, with an unfinished Picasso-like work in the background, the kind of modernist-picture-within-a-picture that Lichtenstein was so fond of including in his art beginning in the early-1970s; the next year, for instance, he inserted a segment of Henri Matisse’s The Dance I in another of his “artist’s studio” paintings [fig. 2].
Not that this collage could have been made by anyone other than Roy Lichtenstein. The Benday dots that course through this primary-colored work quickly became a trademark of his entire artistic enterprise, the irony of this late-Pointillist, postwar-American, inexpensive printing technique lost on no one, least of all the guardians of Good Taste in the art world. So relentlessly did Lichtenstein reimagine the recent artistic past as dotted, striped, and rearranged in a red-yellow-and-blue palette, and outlined in black-and-white, that the history of art in his hands became one great form of self-reference. Indeed, if Picasso’s body of work looked to his contemporaries like the Mount Everest of esthetic achievement, with its constant switching of gears in a seemingly endless stream of brilliant styles and themes, then it was to that summit that Lichtenstein would keep returning to plant his own artistic flag (and thereby both pay homage to and thumb his nose at the Man from Malaga).
Those Picasso games as played by Lichtenstein became increasingly complex over the years, as we see more than two decades later in Nude with Bust (Study). Now, the intricate composition makes for a fascinating if enigmatic mise-en-scène: a nude young model kneels on an armchair, sandwiched between a female bust on a pedestal pushed up close to the picture plane and, hanging on the back wall, what appears to be a painting of a room’s interior, with a side chair and yet another painting hanging on its wall (which is to say: we’ve got a painting within a painting within a painting). We know the kinds of pictures by Picasso that Lichtenstein is thinking about here, one’s in which, beginning in the decade after the First World War, he juxtaposed images of artist’s models, flat depictions of them, and sculpted heads [fig. 3]. These alternative modes of representation within the artist’s studio, this play with reality and illusion, allowed Picasso to think about the similarities and differences between what it means to make two-dimensional and three-dimensional works of art: is the painted image, which is pure illusion, more “real” than the sculpted effigy, which exists in real space? Are they equally real or commensurately unreal? And doesn’t this mean, in any case, that the artist is a kind of magician?
"In fact, for all its game-playing, this work, made just two years before Lichtenstein’s (unexpected) death, turns out to be a rather moving meditation on his early Pop Art career: in 1964, near his studio on 26th Street, he purchased two mannequin heads and painted one up in colored, cartoon-character style [fig. 4], forerunner of the polychrome bust in the foreground of our collage, and that same year clipped out a frame from an issue of Young Romance comic book [fig. 5], where we find the source for the kneeling pin-up in the collage."
Lichtenstein thought so, and in turn raised all of Picasso’s questions to a higher power. Is the kneeling pin-up in Nude with Bust (Study) the real thing and the mounted bust in the foreground her replica? Perhaps, but she’s rendered in unreal black-and-white (although with red lips) and the bust has brilliant yellow, i.e. blond, hair (also with red lips), making this three-dimensional portrayal more full-bodied than her 2D sister. Isn’t this the reverse of what we usually expect of painted images, that they be colored, and that sculpted ones—in stone, wood, or metal—be monochromatic? And can we help but note that both these female depictions, painted and sculpted, are vertically traversed by Lichtenstein’s now-classic cartoon style Benday dots, a system used for depicting chiaroscuro in print form, except that here the shading exceeds the limits of the things it’s expected to render rotund, and thus floats in thin air, becoming a thing in itself? In fact, for all its game-playing, this work, made just two years before Lichtenstein’s (unexpected) death, turns out to be a rather moving meditation on his early Pop Art career: in 1964, near his studio on 26th Street, he purchased two mannequin heads and painted one up in colored, cartoon-character style [fig. 4], forerunner of the polychrome bust in the foreground of our collage, and that same year clipped out a frame from an issue of Young Romance comic book [fig. 5], where we find the source for the kneeling pin-up in the collage (her name was “Penny,” and was originally clad in a striped bathing suit, chatting on the beach with a guy from her office), an unused snippet of popular culture that Lichtenstein had filed away thirty years earlier and into which he now breathed a splendid new artistic life.
