Crak! (C.II.2), made in 1963, sits at the centre of what Lichtenstein was doing in the years that made his reputation — a lithograph drawn from a war comic showing a female resistance fighter crouching behind cover, rifle raised, the word CRAK! erupting from the barrel in bold onomatopoeic lettering, a speech bubble below reading NOW, MES PETITS... POUR LA FRANCE! The image is horizontal and cinematic, cropped tight to face, gun, and explosive letterform, the print divided between the pink Ben-Day dot patterning of the figure's face and background, the flat yellow of her clothing, and the stark white ground against which the text detonates.

The work was made at the same moment as the paintings that would define his career, and extends the same investigation into a medium that carried its own argument — printmaking being, like the comic book itself, a technology of mass reproduction, the image existing in multiples by design, its meaning inseparable from its capacity to circulate. Lichtenstein was not slumming in popular culture; he was working inside its actual conditions.

Across the print, word and image carry equal formal weight — the letterforms as considered in their placement and scale as the figure and the rifle beneath them, the whole surface organised around the same flat graphic logic that Lichtenstein had absorbed from decades of commercial printing. The subject is violent and gendered, but Crak! offers it with the same even attention it would give a landscape, that refusal to editorialise forcing the viewer to examine what they bring to the image themselves.

For more information or to buy Crak! by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.