Chem IA (C.100) belongs to the Peace Through Chemistry Series, produced in 1970 at a moment when the post-war promise of American industry — "better living through chemistry," the DuPont slogan that had run through the nation's self-image since the 1940s — was beginning to look considerably less benign, the environmental and human costs of the chemical industry's expansion no longer possible to ignore.

The print draws its imagery directly from the molecular diagrams of scientific textbooks — interlocking rods and angular connectors running across the picture plane in black and white, circular nodes punctuating the structure at intervals, yellow Ben-Day dot fields pressing in from the edges and corners. The forms lock together with the close tolerance of engineered parts, each element precisely positioned relative to the next, the whole surface organised with a rigour that the original notation had developed in service of scientific accuracy and that here produces something closer to the logic of abstract painting. Nothing in the image is decorative. Every mark has the authority of a diagram.

The Peace Through Chemistry Series extended the same operation Lichtenstein had applied to comic books and advertising into the territory of scientific illustration — a different register of mass-produced, industrially purposeful imagery, submitted to the same scrutiny. Chem IA (C.100) is among the most formally resolved works in the series, its cool precision sitting in quietly unsettling proximity to the benevolent scientific optimism its title invokes.

For more information or to buy Chem IA by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.