The Modern Head Series, made by Roy Lichtenstein in 1970, represented one of his most obvious engagements with the territory of early twentieth-century avant-garde art. The five works in the series drew on Cubism, Constructivism, and Art Deco, subjecting these movements to the very close scrutiny that Lichtenstein had previously directed at comic books and Impressionism. Modern Head #1 (C.91) opens the series with style clearly indebted to Cubism: fragmented planes, multiple viewpoints, the human head built as an interlocking choice of geometric and curved forms in primary red, blue, and yellow against a dot-field ground. The Cubist reference was precise.

Lichtenstein was working specifically with the phase of Synthetic Cubism in which Picasso and Braque had begun to reintroduce colour and legible subject matter into their fragmented compositions — the moment at which Cubism became, in certain respects, a transmissible style as well as a perceptual method.

By building this style through the Ben-Day dot and open colour fields, Lichtenstein asked whether Cubism's innovations had become settled modes in the same way that Impressionism's atmospheric effects had — reproducible, available as a repeatable style, not a mode of perception.

For more information or to buy Modern Head #1 by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.