Roy Lichtenstein Entablature Series Prints For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein found the Entablature Series walking around Wall Street and Lower Manhattan, where the horizontal banded moulding that classical architecture sets above its columns turns up constantly on the Beaux-Arts and Greco-Roman revival buildings scattered through the city's older financial district. He started painting the subject in 1970, working alongside his Mirror paintings at the time, and moved through two distinct phases before the prints arrived, an early black-and-white group followed by a second series that introduced colour, with eleven prints in 1976 bringing the project to a close. Lichtenstein was explicit about what drew him to the motif in the first place: entablatures let him isolate what he called clichéd symbols of "imperial power" and "the establishment," architectural ornament that had been mass-produced and endlessly reused across public buildings until its original grandeur curdled into something closer to décor.

That tension between weighty historical symbolism and cheap, repeated ornamentation runs through the whole series, echoing the same interest in mass reproduction that had already driven Lichtenstein's Haystack, Cathedral and Bull prints earlier in the decade, only here applied to architecture that had been literally mass-reproduced across dozens of American buildings rather than existing as a single painted image. Coming from a New York-based publication covering the Whitney's own retrospective of the series, the 1976 prints were described as the most technologically advanced Lichtenstein had made up to that point, a project approached with real ambition rather than treated as a minor architectural sideline.

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