Roy Lichtenstein

Ace Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in June 1993

Exh. Cat., London (and travelling), Gagosian Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein Sculpture, 2005, p. 71 [color illustration of the Maquette for Five Brushtrokes, 1984 (cast 2005)]

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Roy Lichtenstein's Five Brushstrokes from 1994 stands totemic; large sweeping colorful brushstrokes, suspended in midair, and balanced one on top of the other in dynamic sculptural spectacle.  The brushstroke was not a new subject for Lichtenstein when he began the brushstroke sculpture series in the 1980s; however, it was a daring new aesthetic for a three-dimensional endeavor in which the artist played with our perception of what encompasses "high art".  Lichtenstein first used the brushstroke as a central subject matter in his paintings in 1965 and this basic unit of art-making was the ultimate trope for his investigations of art about art.  On monumental canvases, Lichtenstein portrayed images of large strokes on backgrounds of his signature Benday dots.  With a nod towards gestural painting and Abstract Expressionism, Lichtenstein traces the movement of the artist's hand and pays homage to the fundamental aspect of the artistic process – the brushstroke, while simultaneously creating a parody of it as he flattened and crisply delineated the composition.  The present work ranks among the best examples of Post-War sculpture as Lichtenstein created a magical illusion of pictorial space that heroically soars upward.

Lichtenstein began making sculpture in the early 1960s, directly following his first exhibition of paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery.  His earliest sculptures included standardized interpretations of everyday household objects and stylized heads, both of which were directly influenced by the representation of commercial objects in his paintings.  The Brushstroke sculptures seem to encompass many of Lichtenstein's thoughts about art during the 1960s including definitions of what could be considered art.  The spontaneity of a brush stroke, the ultimate artistic gesture, is captured in Five Brushstrokes in a wonderful twist of aesthetic satire.  The essence of an artist's motion becomes frozen in time.  It is the ultimate artistic irony.  With expressive exuberance, Lichtenstein lifted the brushstroke from the canvas and created a new form.  Dave Hickey writes, "Far from offering putative comic relief from painterly heroism, Lichtenstein's brushstrokes clearly aspired to replace them, and, in the friendliest manner imaginable, they did just that, not by offering up a new historical style to supplant painterly abstraction, but by offering an alternative model of artistic practice that repositioned abstract painting in a broad field of equally weighted endeavors.  In simple terms, Lichtenstein sought to retain the rhetoric of doubt, difficulty and latent abstraction that invigorates modernist practice while dispensing with its directional historical thrust." (Dave Hickey, Roy Lichtenstein Brushstrokes: Four Decades, New York, 2001, p. 11)

The present work is a rare example from the Brushstroke series.  Many of the works in the series depict only one, two or three brushstrokes.  Here, Lichtenstein's more complex combination of five brushstrokes heightens the three-dimensional animation of the work.  The interplay of strokes creates an abstracted figurative composition with the body comprised of the yellow, green and blue strokes, the head and hair from the pink stroke and the face from the red.  In both his paintings and sculptures, Lichtenstein had an uncanny ability to use reductive design and imagery to make a bold statement.  He may reduce the form but not the power of the message.  Although on the surface his works can seem simplistic, Lichtenstein imbues his compositions with a sly undercurrent of the effect of mass consumerism on society. 

The Pop art phenomenon began in the 1960s with Lichtenstein's appropriation of images from mass produced comic books and commercial advertising campaigns, while at the same time Andy Warhol also investigated new ways to translate ideas of the current society onto the canvas.  Both artists called into question the very nature of art, its meaning and processes.  The Brushstroke series sustains this hunger for probing inquiry as Lichtenstein translated his signature graphic style – strongly delineated and with an emphasis on saturated color - into a whole new medium of sculpture.  Bernice Rose wrote on the technique Lichtenstein used to create the Brushstroke paintings: "He found the brushstroke difficult to create as a cliché.  In fact he found he could not draw it at all, at first.  He thought of brushstrokes as wide lines; evidently, it was difficult to draw a description of a line – to describe a line with a line.  He finally discovered that if he painted an actual brushstroke as a small study with ink or Magna on acetate, the acetate would repel the wet medium, forcing it to "crawl" back within its own contours, so that it looked like an imitation of itself.  Projecting the study onto canvas enabled him to draw on outline around the brushstroke, creating it as a distinct formal unit, stylized as a cartoon." (Exh. Cat, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein, 1987, p. 27). For the sculpture series, Lichtenstein's process began with a collage of the composition constructed from broad sections of color, and smaller maquettes followed the fabrication of the larger version. The brushstroke image captures the act of painting.  While gently poking fun at the righteousness of Abstract Expressionism, Five Brushstrokes, and the Brushstroke series as a whole bring one of the artist's defining themes to life in a monumental scale and evokes the movement and color of paint on canvas in a dynamic new medium.