Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot (C.130) places two of the most unremarkable domestic objects available to a still life painter — a coffee pot and a potted plant — against a trellis-patterned ground and treats them with the same zeal that Cézanne directed at apples and Chardin at copper vessels. The coffee pot is rendered in bold black outline with diagonal hatching indicating its metallic surface, a single flash of blue marking the body; the flower pot sits to the right in deep red and white stripes, its blooms reduced to dark red rings on a green ground, the whole arrangement horizontal and deliberate against the crossing diagonals of the trellis behind.

By 1974 Lichtenstein had worked through Impressionism in the Haystack and Cathedral prints and abstraction in the Bull series — genres and movements examined through the same lens each time, their conventions absorbed and made visible. The still life was the genre that underpinned all of them, the form Western painting had used for four centuries to test its own relationship to depicted objects. Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot (C.130) enters that tradition not through luxury or symbolism but through the most ordinary of subjects, the coffee pot and flower pot carrying no more art-historical charge than their function as objects the genre had long since domesticated into convention.

For more information or to buy Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.