Roy Lichtenstein American Indian Theme Series Prints For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein began work on the American Indian Theme series at Tyler Graphics Ltd. in the spring of 1979, working in woodcut for the first time since the 1950s, a genuinely rare return to a medium he'd otherwise left behind for over two decades. The six prints draw directly on Native American visual traditions, totem poles, woven textiles, beadwork, quillwork, ceramics and basketry, rearranged into the flat, graphic compositions that define his practice more broadly. They sit close alongside ten paintings from the same year that combined the same imagery with Surrealist elements, meaning this series picked up almost exactly where his Surrealist period left off, carrying the same interest in blending unrelated visual traditions into a single composition.

Woodcut suited the subject in a way lithography or screenprint couldn't quite manage, giving the prints a carved, textured quality closer to the physical objects they were referencing than Lichtenstein's usual flat, mechanical surfaces. Native American imagery had long occupied an outsized place in American mythology by the time Lichtenstein turned to it, filtered through everything from nineteenth-century Western expansion narratives to the mass-produced Americana of the twentieth century, appearing on currency, in advertising, in Hollywood Westerns and on countless commercial products, a set of symbols repeated so often across popular culture that they had become almost as flattened and standardised as a comic strip panel. That's territory Lichtenstein had circled his entire career, taking images that mass reproduction had already stripped of their original meaning and pushing them one step further into his own graphic language, and the American Indian Theme prints apply that same logic to a body of imagery that sat closer to the American national psyche than a comic panel ever could, symbols already carrying the weight of myth before he ever touched them.

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