R
eflections on Pop: Works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein is both a title and a premise: an invitation to reexamine one of the most celebrated artists of the Twentieth Century through a selection of works that span Lichtenstein’s entire career and encompasses the full range of his artistic practice. Retrospective in nature, Reflections on Pop charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein’s style across decades and diverse media, offering a rare opportunity to trace his evolution as a pioneer of Pop Art. The works extend a pivotal focus on the importance of process and mark-making, countering critiques that Pop Art removes the artist's hand.
Within Lichtenstein’s oeuvre the word reflection is evocative. It gestures toward the reflective surfaces of his celebrated Reflections paintings, in which diagonal streaks of light appear to glide across images recalling glass, mirrors, or the mediated act of viewing itself. It also nods to the idea of looking back, reflecting on the progression of Lichtenstein’s body of work and the themes that define it: an engagement with mass media, a dialogue with art history, a playful subversion of painterly gesture, and a fascination with the mechanics of perception. In this way, Reflections on Pop becomes a conceptual through-line for the Collection across painting, sculpture, collage, drawing, and prints.
Together, the works offer a look at Lichtenstein’s most iconic, instantly recognizable motifs, including the influence (and humor) of comic strips. In Slam from 1989, an action scene is distilled into a single decisive instant with Lichtenstein’s celebrated use of bold text; in It is You (Study) from 1993 a blonde heroine is caught in a longing embrace; in Reflections on the Prom (Study) from 1990, a dramatic moment is frozen in time. Rendered in Lichtenstein’s signature crisp outlines, heightened primary colors and Ben-Day dots, the works merge the language of commercial printing with the scale and seriousness of fine art, upending convention.
Equally present are the Brushstroke works, such as the 1988 bronze brushwork sculpture Petite coups de pinceau and the 1997 print Brushstroke Still Life with Lamp, which convey one of Lichtenstein’s most enduring and conceptually rich motifs. In these works, the spontaneous flourish of Abstract Expressionism is reimagined as a stylized, graphic emblem, meticulously planned and crisply executed. What might once have been the ultimate sign of an artist’s individual hand becomes a universal, repeatable sign, at once celebrating and parodying expressive gesture. Yet throughout the selection of works in Reflections on Pop, the highly stylized collaged, sculpted or printed brushstroke is juxtaposed against painted and drawn brushstrokes, again tangible evidence of the artist’s hand. This duality, between authenticity and artifice, spontaneity and controlled design, runs throughout the grouping and indeed throughout Lichtenstein’s wider oeuvre.
The Reflections series is a cornerstone of the Collection, and pushes this play of mediation further. Here, Lichtenstein incorporates optical barriers into the image, so that the viewer experiences not just a painted scene but also the illusion of light skipping across a pane of glass on the surface of the scene. The result is both alluring and distancing: the image is vivid and bold, yet always fractured, a reminder that our experience of art is shaped by the surfaces and contexts through which we view it. One of the most significant works within the selection is Reflections: Wimpy I from 1988, a direct re-imagining of Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting Wimpy (Tweet). In Reflections on Wonder Woman (Study) – the study for the major painting of the same title executed in 1989 – Lichtenstein creates the reflection of glass over Wonder Woman’s fierce expression through a frenetic cross-hatching of blue pencil marks. A similar effect is created on the surface of the collage Reflections on Expressionist Painting (Study) from 1990, but through the use of printed strips of Ben-Day dots.
Beyond these celebrated motifs, Reflections on Pop includes works that reveal the careful experimentation and process behind major paintings. Once such example is the dialogue between the large-scale 1975 painting Eclipse of the Sun II – which sees Lichtenstein experiment with the imagery of Futurism – and the corresponding study, a small-scale work on paper entitled Eclipse of the Sun and Eclipse of the Sun II (Studies) executed in preparation for the painting that same year. Across the wider grouping, the drawings, with their swift lines and compositional tests, provide insight into the early stages of Lichtenstein’s creative process. Collages, in which images are cut, layered, and rearranged, show how he constructed compositions with immediacy and precision. Sculptures extend his graphic sensibility into the third dimension, while prints showcase Lichtenstein’s unparalleled ability to translate painterly effects into the realm of mechanical reproduction.
Taken together, these works form a portrait of Lichtenstein as a meticulous innovator, an artist who continually tested the boundaries between high and low culture, fine art and mass media, image and object. Reflections on Pop is, ultimately, a lens through which to consider the full scope of Lichtenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century art. It brings into focus the themes that defined his practice, the variety of media in which he excelled, and the conceptual rigor that underpinned his instantly recognizable style. By gathering works that span decades and disciplines, Reflections on Pop invites viewers not just to see Lichtenstein anew, but to reflect on the artist, on Pop Art, and on the images that continue to shape our understanding of culture.
