Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 928)
Margo Leavin Gallery, New York
Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
James Goodman Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 1987

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Paintings, December 1983 - January 1984
London, Waddington Galleries, Groups VIII, January - February 1985, cat. no. 36, p. 11, illustrated
Roslyn Harbor, Nassau County Museum of Art, Art After Art, September 1994 - January 1995, cat. no. 67, p. 76, illustrated in color
Roslyn Harbor, Nassau County Museum of Art, Master Artworks from Private Collections, August - November 2005

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 blonde wood strip frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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As the 1980s began, Roy Lichtenstein had already established himself as a formidable and influential Pop Art master and icon of the Post-War era. As part of his creative process, the artist was known for re-exploring and mining recurrent themes as he investigated them in depth throughout his practice. Two Paintings: Folded Sheets reveals Lichtenstein at just such a juncture, melding his hard-edged, flattened renderings with his Expressionistic style in much the same way he had in the Brushstroke paintings dating from the mid-1960s. The brushtroke was a key avatar for this artist who was known for making art about art and questioning the nature of painting in contemporary art. It is no accident that he chose his Brushstroke paintings for the concept behind the series of which Two Paintings: Folded Sheets is a stellar example. 

Beginning in 1982, Lichtenstein created compositions that juxtaposed sections of his Brushstroke paintings with various other more representational genres from his oeuvre, almost as if we are viewers at a retrospective exhibition of his work. In Two Paintings: Folded Sheets, Lichtenstein appropriated his own iconography of the folded sheets from one of his office interiors, Still Life with Folded Sheets from 1976. He depicted the Brushstroke painting and the domestic interior installed side-by-side on the same implied wall, setting up a disconnected-ness between the flat, planar surface of the former and the illusion of three-dimensionality in the latter. By placing such divergent images adjacent to each other within this painting, Lichtenstein challenges what we see upon first glance. In Two Paintings: Folded Sheets, the right side of the composition presents the Brushstroke canvas while the domestic interior painting is shown on the right, with both works at the same eye level separated only by the simulated picture frame and blue-striped wall. The viewer reads the images as two-dimensional, encapsulated by the rendered frame edges and pressed forward toward the surface picture plane. On a deeper level,  one can also read the entire scene as a domestic interior assuming the folded sheets are a reflection in a mirror, presented in a flattened and foreshortened view of an actual three-dimensional room. In this interpretation, the Brushstroke painting is the only canvas to inhabit the interior, juxtaposed as an opaque surface beside a reflective surface. By challenging the viewer's perception of what we are actually observing, Lichtenstein undermined the "reality" of the gestural canvas and the enigmatic still life as objects.

The artist frequently sourced images from popular magazines, printed newspaper advertisements or cartoons, clipping and preserving many in his copious collection of notebooks. The present painting takes its inspiration from one of many such clippings that include neatly folded sheets. The "tablecloth" upon which the folded sheets are placed is boldly incongruous in contrast to the monochromatic, hard edge, rigid forms of the folded bath sheets. The artist maintains a consistency of palette by incorporating the saturated blues and yellows on both the left and right side of the picture plane, further linking the seemingly disjointed elements.

Lichtenstein's Paintings: Folded Sheets closely relates to Jasper Johns' 1976 composition titled End Paper. Johns' diptych illustrates the tightly rendered diagonals of a repetitive cross-hatching juxtaposed against the larger geometric polygons on the right side of the picture plane. Johns created the composition on the left side of the canvas using short, quick brushstrokes, while on the right, the shapes are geometric solids, outlined in a manner reminiscent of flagstone pavings or floor tiling. In Lichtenstein's Two Paintings: Folded Sheets, the artist's abbreviated slanting lines, articulating the wall and portions of the table top, are both evocative of Johns' earlier use of the motif in End Paper and a key component of his own lexicon of methods for implying depth or concreteness. Most vividly, Lichtenstein's patterned table top could be an appropriated design from Johns' earlier motif: the flagstone pattern, which he had first glimpsed from a passing car on a wall in Harlem in 1967. This pattern would re-emerge throughout Johns' works since the late 1960s and certainly would have been familiar to Lichtenstein.

Concurrent to the Two Paintings series of the early 1980s, Lichtenstein also painted canvases such as Paintings: Mirror (1984) that more explicitly reference the interplay between canvas surface and reflective surface that is merely implied in Two Paintings: Folded Sheets. Conceptually, it is a natural progression to the Reflections series of the late 1980s and 1990s in which a painting, recognizable to us as an iconic Lichtenstein painting of the 1960s, fills the canvas surface, only to be obscured by the reflective glare of a mirrored surface. Along with the Imperfect Painting series of the late 1980s, it is evident that Two Paintings: Folded Sheets is a pivotal part of a conceptual idiom that preoccupied Lichtenstein for much of the decade.