Roy Lichtenstein Composition Series Prints For Sale

The Composition series, made in the final years of Lichtenstein's life, takes musical notation as its subject, dancing notes and lines rendered in his usual flat colour and Ben-Day dots, a genuinely unusual departure from the comic strips, art history and architecture that had supplied most of his source material for the previous three decades. Composition IV came first, signed in the autumn of 1995 and co-published as a benefit print supporting a Kennedy for Senate Committee campaign, giving this particular sheet a direct political and philanthropic purpose rather than being made purely for the print market. Composition I, II and III followed in 1996, and all four were shown together that March at an exhibition called Roy Lichtenstein: 8 New Editions, which travelled from Los Angeles to Leo Castelli Gallery in New York the following month, one of the last times new work from Lichtenstein was shown publicly before his death in 1997.

Music had rarely surfaced directly as subject matter across Lichtenstein's career, which makes this small group of prints an interesting outlier within his late output, translating something inherently temporal and auditory into the same flat, static visual language he had spent his whole career applying to comic panels, cathedrals and mirrors. Coming right at the close of his life, the series reads less like a planned late statement and more like Lichtenstein simply following a new idea, still finding fresh subject matter for his established graphic vocabulary decades after Whaam! and Crying Girl first made his name.

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