Roy Lichtenstein

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in March 1988

New York, 65 Thompson Street, Roy Lichtenstein, Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, May - July 1989, cat. no. 28, p. 75, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Salas Nacional y Diego Rivera; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; La Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belem, Roy Lichtenstein, Escultura, Pintura y Grafica, July 1998 - August 2000, cat. no. 107, pp. 19 and 156, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash; Zurich, de Pury & Luxembourg, Roy Lichtenstein Brushstrokes: Four Decades, November 2001 - June 2002 (another example exhibited)

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the extreme edges including some minor rubbing and loss to the paint at the tip of the lower blue area and in the center of the black outline of the gold. There is some very minor evidence of pitting to the gold-painted area. One side of the gold area exhibits some scattered drip accretions and cleaning residue. Under very close inspection, a minor area of cracking is visible to the upper white-painted area, minor surface scratches are visible and some light brown drip accretions are visible in the white, possibly from the time of execution.
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"Lichtenstein seems busily deconstructing the language and painterly idioms of Abstract Expressionism to make its artistic medium the actual message. He had done this in his paintings of the 1960s and in his overtly gestural paintings of the 1980s, always in generational dialogue with the history and mythology of abstraction and expressionism. In these brushstroke sculptures it is as if Lichtenstein wanted us to think this is what Franz Kline, as well, might have done had he worked in three dimensions. Clearly this historic appropriation is the case with Lichtenstein's next suite of four Brushstroke Heads, 1987,  in editions of six, where he takes de Kooning like face forms and casts them in painted and patinated bronze. Since we already know that de Kooning made sculpture (but not at all like this), we appreciate the conceptual and visual puns all the more."
Jack Cowart, "Lichtenstein Sculpture: Multiple Personalities—A Quick Survey of Five Decades," in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Lichtenstein: Sculptures & Drawings, 1999, p. 19

Brushstroke Head I’s status as an exemplary work in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre is twofold. It serves as a clear example of Roy Lichtenstein’s fascination with the subject of the female muse and of his desire to identify and isolate the basic language of painting, the brushstroke, thus combining two of Lichtenstein’s most enduring interests. The present work references the female form and in particular the face with its arrangement of brushstrokes to signify the eyes and mouth whilst the bright yellow brushstroke acts as the blonde hair so emblematic of many of Lichtenstein’s depictions of women. The collection of classic Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots doubles as the woman’s freckled skin whilst also alluding to the artist’s interest in the visual language of comics.

Lichtenstein’s technical virtuosity has long been lauded. The rigorous high standards in quality he set himself in his painting remain true in his sculpture. These magnificently executed works are the result of several stages of careful planning. Starting as sketches of imagined forms stimulated by both mass media and art history, Lichtenstein would then build working models and full-scale maquettes. The full-scale maquettes were subsequently used to create the casting molds of sculptures such as Brushstroke Head I, 1987.

Many of Lichtenstein’s most notable pieces spanning throughout his career have demonstrated a keen interest in exploring the storied tradition of the woman as artist’s muse, while also exploring women’s role in a new Pop world. These range from Woman with Flowered Hat from 1963, Sleeping Girl from 1964, Ohhh…Alright…, 1964 to his later work in the 1990s such as Seductive Girl, 1996 and Nude With Red Shirt, 1995. All of these works have achieved records for Lichtenstein and proven to be some of the artist’s most iconic images.

Concurrent to his exploration of the fabled artist’s muse is Lichtenstein’s identification of the brushstroke as the most basic language form in painting. In 1965, Lichtenstein created several important works that treated the brushstroke as the central subject matter in an almost figure-like manner, and Yellow and White Brushstrokes, 1965 is a prime example of this.

Lichtenstein’s investigation of two traditional pillars of image-making, interpreted through his signature Pop lens, typifies the artist’s desire to conflate the high and the low elements of culture into a single frame. As the eminent art historian Hal Foster writes, "The collision of high and low modes is the very strategy of his art, indeed of Pop in general, and here he extends it to sculpture as well: traditional bust meets abstract mannequin, Abstract Expressionist brushstroke meets cartoon sign of the same. Crucially, however, the reference to traditional genres not only frames this collision, but in doing so, controls it as well" (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, Sculpture, 2005).

In the 1980s, Lichtenstein translated these interests from two dimensional painting to three dimensional sculpture and fused his images of women with those of brushstrokes to create Brushstroke Head I, 1987. This bold and graphic work challenges the methods and notions of visual perception and subvert the illusion of representation all the while maintaining the artist’s playful negotiation between high and low culture.