Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 1138)
Pace Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1993

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Munich, Haus der Kunst; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Brussels, Les Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts; Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts; Roy Lichtenstein, October 1993 – January 1996, cat. no. 242, p. 311, illustrated in color
Rome, Chiostro de Bramante; Milan, Padiglione de Arte; Trieste, Museo Revoltella; Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum; Roy Lichtenstein, Riflessi-Reflections, December 1999 – January 2001, cat. no. 27, p. 83, illustrated in color
Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Roy Lichtenstein – Classic of the New, June – September 2005, p. 171, illustrated in color
New York, Pace Gallery, 50 Years at Pace: Art in the Twenty-First Century, September - October 2010

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a wood strip frame.
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Roy Lichtenstein's Interior with Bathroom Painting is from one of the last major bodies of work the artist embarked upon prior to his death. For at least a decade, the artist had encorporated his own works within his paintings, thus deepening the dialogue of "art about art" that so enriched his Pop oeuvre. Interior with Bathroom Painting includes both paintings and sculptures that reference his earlier works, but it is the allusion to another canvas interior that is the most optically challenging and deeply meaningful element of this work. As in the earlier Two Paintings and Paintings series of the 1980s, the title suggests that the bathroom scene is a painting, further indicated by the frame surrounding this view. However, one is always left to wonder if this is not also a reflection in a mirror, allowing a view into a real bathroom interior that is potentially behind the viewer. 

At first glance, the viewer is cast in the role of a voyeur gazing into the interior of a living room; however, the observer is denied access into personal insights about the inhabitants. The domestic dwelling depicted is devoid of personal touch or intimacy. One does not detect the character of the resident and is thus unaware of their aesthetic sense, their literary, religious or political inclinations. The hard-edge, black lines outlining each architectural element are typical of Lichtenstein's graphic style and here the precise and cool rendering further emphasizes the impersonal aspect of the living space. The walls are covered in the famous Benday dots and diagonal striping that had long been Lichtenstein's signature painting technique, originally appropriated from cartoon formatted images from the mid-century. As with his earlier Pop masterpieces, these spatial devices serve to flatten any sense of dimensionality and add to the complex interplay of spatial interiors in Interior with Bathroom Painting.

Interior with Bathroom Painting harkens back to the interior subjects the artist tackled 30 years earlier in his career, inspired by the print advertisements in mainstream publications that celebrate the acquisitions that a middle-class American housewife could aspire to in the new, consumerist-driven culture of the post-war era. Beginning in 1961, Lichtenstein translated these appropriated elements into the lines, colors and forms of his compositions and in Bathroom from that year, Lichtenstein's palette of black and white acknowledged the print source for the sink, bathtub and toilet. Despite the seeming exactitude of the composition and its general fidelity to the 'low-brow' source image, the viewer can see traces of the artist's touch. The lines are not entirely precise and the bath mat adjacent to the tub and the bath curtain lack the exactitude Lichtenstein masters in his later compositions. The monochromatic interior space seems as if it is on display and never occupied.

When Lichtenstein returned to the subject in the early 1990s, the theme is more pristinely and mechanically rendered, leaving behind the vestiges of hand-painting evident in his early works such as Bathroom. However both the 1961 painting and Interior with Bathroom Painting represent, with their graphic elements and commercial subject matter, Lichtenstein's lifelong fascination between the convergence of non-artistic images and the `high art' of painting. With the present painting Lichtenstein continued to pose the question of the meaning of visual culture in our time. The source material of this later interior painting calls to mind the more 'high-brow' and prestigious glossy magazines that currently showcase the homes, private retreats and sophisticated residential spaces of the affluent. These publications frequently document interiors that harmoniously combine sumptuous furnishings with expensive art in pristinely appointed domiciles that betray little personal sign of the residents.

In the composition, Interior with Bathroom Painting, Lichtenstein, literally provides his own art for the walls of the domestic interior. The artist "installs" for the viewer their very own Sunset, a subject he also revisited throughout his oeuvre.  Moreover, he also harkens back to the beginning of his career as a student of the Abstract Expressionists by including hints of one of his Brushstroke sculptures in the lower right corner. The trace of this painterly "gesture" is the most ironic reference in a composition that so clearly shows the artist appropriating images from his own creative evolution. As Robert Kirkpatrick noted in the catalogue for the 1999 exhibition of the Interiors, "Within the interiors, Lichtenstein lampoons his own art as well as that of others. Yet his allusions and appropriations never mock or condescend. They provoke a wry smile, one perhaps similar to the gleeful expression in his eyes that accompanied the slightest beginnings of a wicked grin. More often than not, his humor was directed at himself. Many of his own works appear on the walls of the interiors, but are stylized – Lichtenstein's versions of Lichtenstein's." (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors, 1999, p. 14)

The complexity of the 1990s Interiors is further enhanced by Lichtenstein's skillful orchestration of bold colors and strong geometrics into a harmonious balance and muscular impact. In Interior with Bathroom Painting, the blue rug and thick black outlines of the interior space are a perfect counterbalance to the cooler tones and lined grids of the ''bathroom'' portion of his composition. The large format of the canvas affords an impressive field within which the artist can render the full range of geometric shapes, color palette and technical devices that made up his full aesthetic vocabulary. The optical play with the bathroom motif, between mirrored image or painted canvas, is further supported by the veritable buzz and vibration of the plastic elements of the painting itself. Within this sumptuous display of artistry, the viewer is left to contemplate the alienation sometimes experienced in conventional contemporary life within the uniformity of bourgeois American aspirations and homes.