Reflections on The Scream (C.243) was the most charged work in Roy Lichtenstein's Reflection Series — Munch's The Scream, one of the most widely known images in the history of Western art, built through his comic-book vernacular and broken by the diagonal silver bands. The anguished figure, the swirling sky, the bridge: all present, all interrupted, visible between the metallic strips in the clean outlines and dot patterns of Lichtenstein's print language.

The choice of Munch was significant. Where the other Reflection prints had drawn on Lichtenstein's own imagery or on the prevailing language of popular culture, Reflections on The Scream (C.243) worked directly with a canonical work of early modernism — an image that had itself become a cultural fixture, reproduced and circulated so widely that its original expressionist charge had been absorbed into popular culture. Lichtenstein was reflecting on an image that was already, in a cultural sense, a reflection: The Scream as it existed in 1990 was not Munch's painting but its global reproduction.

By drawing this doubly mediated image into the reflective dispersal of the series, Roy Lichtenstein added a further layer to a process of cultural reproduction that was already several removes from the original. Reflections on The Scream (C.243) was the most explicit demonstration of the series' central claim — that the images which circulate in culture are always already reflections, always already broken by the media through which they travel — and it made this point by choosing the most universally circulated image in the Western canon as its subject.

For more information or to buy Reflections on The Scream by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.