Landscape 1 (C.51) belongs to a moment of deliberate expansion in Roy Lichtenstein's career — half a decade after establishing himself as the most rigorous intelligence of the American Pop Art movement, the case that commercial imagery deserved a close looking like fine art had been made and largely won.

Lichtenstein turned that same attention toward a subject with deep roots in Western painterly history: the landscape. Three horizontal bands of solid colour — a purple dot-patterned sky, a single white curving form suggesting cloud, a yellow-green earth — reduce the natural world to its most essential elements.

The Ten Landscapes series was not a straightforward approach to nature. What interested Lichtenstein was the coded imagery through which landscape had been absorbed into American popular culture — the simplified horizon, the pared-down sky, the reduction of the natural world to a set of printed signs. The series also marked a significant technical departure.

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