Red and Yellow Apple (C.195) sets two apple forms side by side in Roy Lichtenstein's Seven Apple Woodcut Series — yellow on the left, red on the right, both built from overlapping directional strokes in the boldest, most physically energetic picture in the group. The marks press outward from the circular outlines, the accumulated layers of yellow, red, and black giving the surface a density and warmth that the cooler, more contained works in the series deliberately avoid.

The red apple carried specific art-historical weight. In the still life tradition it was among the most familiar and most examined of subjects — from Cézanne, whose obsessive scrutiny of fruit volumes had laid the groundwork for how twentieth-century painting understood form, to Magritte, whose Surrealist imagery had given the same familiar object a dreamlike strangeness. Lichtenstein's version was neither of these: the apple processed through the woodcut mark, its form arriving through accumulated directional strokes rather than through observation or symbolic transformation, the subject present as a starting point for the medium's own physical logic rather than as an end in itself.

The Seven Apple Woodcut Series was produced at a moment when Lichtenstein was actively exploring the expressive range of the woodcut, having worked through the Expressionist Woodcut Series the previous year. Red and Yellow Apple (C.195) showed what the medium could produce when given a subject as direct as a piece of fruit — the marks freed from the art-historical argument of the Expressionist series and allowed simply to do what woodcut marks do, the warmth and physicality of the process arriving at a picture that was, by Lichtenstein's standards, unusually unguarded.

For more information or to buy Red and Yellow Apple by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.