The Interior Series works in the opposite order from most of Roy Lichtenstein's output: rather than translating an existing painting into print, the prints came first, starting with preliminary discussions in the autumn of 1989 and eight small collages made in Lichtenstein's New York studio, before the related paintings followed. The whole project sits in direct conversation with Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?", widely credited as the image that effectively started Pop Art as a movement, meaning one of Pop's own founders returned, near the end of his career, to the exact domestic-interior subject that had launched the whole thing decades earlier.
There's something particularly American about the rooms Lichtenstein chose to build: sofas, lamps, bookshelves, vases, a television set, the sealed-off, aspirational domesticity of a suburban living room or den, the kind of interior sold to a generation through furniture catalogues and department store advertisements rather than lived in exactly as pictured. That's the tradition Lichtenstein was drawing on directly, the mid-century promise of a clean-lined, comfortably furnished, thoroughly modern home that stood in for a whole set of postwar American ideas about what domestic life was supposed to look like. Rendering that imagery in flat colour and Ben-Day dots keeps the rooms at arm's length even as the subject matter, a bedroom, a den, somewhere to sit and watch television, is about as intimate and private as a picture can get, the tension between the coldness of the technique and the warmth of the setting running through the whole series.
Several of the eight prints are self-referential. Red Lamps includes a painting on the wall that reads unmistakably as a nod to Jackson Pollock, Yellow Vase and Modern Room both hang paintings with an unmistakably Warhol-like quality, and Living Room folds in Roy Lichtenstein's own brushstroke motif as one of the depicted artworks on its wall. It places his own artistic lineage inside the most unremarkable rooms he could invent, embedding a small piece of art history into furniture that otherwise looks lifted straight from a furniture catalogue, the private American home doubling as a quiet record of the movement it helped inspire in the first place.
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