Nudes and Icons: Roy Lichtenstein's Most Cherished Works - Video

Unique works of art separated by more than two decades, these two superb collages present us with the full range of Lichtenstein’s formal and thematic concerns. The work from 1973, Still Life with Picasso (Study) was preliminary to the pulling of a silkscreen print; that from 1995, Nude with Bust (Study), was the basis for a painting. Both works are variations on the time-honored subject of the artist’s studio, familiar to us from Rembrandt, Courbet and, among many other artists, Pablo Picasso. One of the Spaniard’s portraits of Dora Maar, from the mid-1930s (drained of color, a black-and-white reversed version) [fig. 1] looms in the background of Lichtenstein’s collage from 1973, behind a table-top arrangement of grapes and bananas, and alongside a pitcher containing paintbrushes, identifying this as a painter’s workplace. The print that resulted from this collage was included in a portfolio, Hommage à Picasso, produced in Berlin and Rome the year of Picasso’s death, with works by, among others, Max Bill, Jim Dine, Henry Moore, and Robert Motherwell. Of course, this might just as well be a representation of Lichtenstein’s own studio, with an unfinished Picasso-like work in the background, the kind of modernist-picture-within-a-picture that Lichtenstein was so fond of including in his art beginning in the early-1970s; the next year, for instance, he inserted a segment of Henri Matisse’s The Dance I in another of his “artist’s studio” paintings.

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