Roy Lichtenstein
40.6 × 29.8 in
Mirror #6 (C.111) takes the arched format that a long tradition of domestic mirror-making had established — the vaulted upper edge of the pier glass or the overmantel mirror — and renders it in a palette of near-white, the surface almost entirely dissolved into pale dot patterning against the cream of the sheet. Two column-like forms of graduated dots occupy the interior of the arch, densest at the centre and thinning toward the edges, the whole image so light it barely announces itself. A purple-blue strip runs down the left margin, a yellow strip along the right edge, small accents of red and other colours gathering at the lower corner: the chromatic information in this work sits at the periphery, framing a reflective surface that has been reduced to the faintest possible register.
The spareness here is of a different kind from Mirror #2. Where that work operated through the near-absence of marks, this one operates through the near-absence of colour, the dot patterning dense enough to establish the mirror's presence but so close in tone to the paper ground that the surface seems to be fading as you look at it. The arched silhouette carries most of the identification — the shape so associated with a particular type of looking-glass that it holds the image as a mirror even as the interior approaches white.
By introducing this format, Lichtenstein connected the series to a strand of decorative tradition that the circular and rectangular works had not touched — the objects through which European domestic interiors had staged their own self-regard across centuries, now subjected to the same stripping-back he had applied to every other mirror in the group.
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