ROY LICHTENSTEIN | TWO NUDES (CORLETT 284)

By employing Benday dot patterns and stripes as modelling devices, Lichtenstein developed a fanciful Pop chiaroscuro that adds both depth and solidity, while supplying two-dimensional colour and texture. In an interview with David Sylvester, the artist explained, ‘It’s a little bit the way chiaroscuro isn’t just shadows but a way of combining the figure and the background, or whatever’s near it in a dark area... You’re not confined to the object pattern, but the subject matter excuse for this is that it’s a shadow. And that’s interesting to me.’ (Quoted in David Sylvester, Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein, p. 38)

Two Nudes is an excellent example from the final years of Lichtenstein’s production, illustrating both a more perfected technical approach to the medium and a reinterpretation of his earlier works and subjects. The figures are taken from a 1963 comic book entitled ‘Girls’ Romances’. Lichtenstein’s compositions emerged from removing the outfits of the protagonists and adding references to his earlier works from series such as Mirrors, Waterlilies, Interiors and Imperfects.

As scholar Sheena Wagstaff puts it, ‘Lichtenstein’s Nudes series, created in the last four years of his life, are a profoundly innovative and active meditation upon the relationship of creation and perception.’ (Wagstaff, in Exh. Cat., Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, 2012, pp. 103-104)