Roy Lichtenstein Cathedral Series Prints For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein's Cathedral prints came out of the same moment as the Haystacks: in the autumn of 1968, he saw an exhibition called Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum, which included work by Monet, and it pushed him toward building a print project around repetition and variation rather than a single standalone image. He began working on the Cathedral prints straight after the Haystacks, continuing through to August 1969. Monet's own Rouen Cathedral paintings were already a serial, systematic project before Lichtenstein got anywhere near them, the same facade painted dozens of times across two years to track how light shifted across the stone through the day and the seasons, which made Monet an unexpectedly close match for an artist whose entire practice already turned on returning to the same subject again and again.

The Corlett catalogue records eight prints in the group, including two additional state editions produced from the same aluminium plates used for Cathedral #6, a technical detail that shows how deliberately Lichtenstein treated the printmaking process itself as part of the series' logic, reusing and adjusting a single set of plates rather than starting fresh for every variation. Asked whether he saw the Cathedral prints differently from the related paintings, Lichtenstein gave a characteristically dry answer: "Yes, I do see them differently; I don't quite know how. Maybe it's because here they are cathedrals in the style of cheap printings brought back again to printings, elegant printings." That comment gets at what makes this series interesting on its own terms, an artist taking one of art history's most reproduced, most painterly subjects and rebuilding it out of the flat, mechanical language of commercial print.

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