The Imperfect series began in early 1987, near the end of Roy Lichtenstein's career, at a point when he had already spent nearly three decades working through comic strips, art history, landscape and architecture as source material for prints. By the late 1980s that pattern of appropriating an outside image had largely run its course, and the Imperfect prints mark a genuine shift toward compositions built entirely from Lichtenstein's own invented abstract vocabulary rather than a borrowed painting, comic panel or architectural detail. One of the first pieces made for the project wasn't part of the series proper at all: a print contributed to a portfolio marking the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Lichtenstein was serving on the board of trustees at the time, alongside seven other major artists of the period including Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Kenny Scharf. Once the edition was finished, Lichtenstein decided he preferred the composition upside down from how it had been printed, and signed it in that reversed orientation instead, meaning the version he authenticated with his own signature runs opposite to how the print was originally designed and produced.
That same willingness to override the intended shape of the sheet runs through the whole series. Stripes, dots and polygonal fields of colour are arranged inside sharp, angular boundaries, only for individual lines or shapes to run straight past the printed edge, breaking the rectangle the image is supposed to sit inside. Lichtenstein paired the series with an earlier body of work called simply "Perfect," made across a similar period and built from the same kind of invented geometric forms, but where the Perfect prints hold their shapes within neat, self-contained boundaries, the Imperfect prints deliberately let the composition spill past its own edge, undercutting the very idea of a clean, resolved picture. Placed against the arc of Lichtenstein's earlier career, the pairing reads almost like a late joke at his own expense, an artist who had spent thirty years reproducing other people's flat, mass-produced images with total precision, turning in his final years to invented abstraction and then refusing to keep even that within its own borders.
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