Roy Lichtenstein Mirror Series Prints For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein's mirrors don't reflect anything, a detail that only becomes apparent once you know to look for it and then becomes hard to unsee. Between late 1969 and 1972 he painted over forty canvases on the subject, and when he moved it into print in 1972, that same rule held across all nine prints in the series, an oval or rectangle built entirely from arcs of Ben-Day dots and diagonal shading standing in for a curved glass surface, with nothing actually shown reflected inside it, an object that only reads as a mirror because you've been told it is one. Asked about this dryness in an interview with the critic Lawrence Alloway, Lichtenstein said: "I am always impressed by how artificial things look, like descriptions of office furniture in newspapers. It is the most dry kind of drawing, as in the Mirrors."

The printmaking behind the series is some of the most technically layered of Lichtenstein's career, mixing lithography, screenprint, line-cut and embossing across the nine sheets, with Mirror #1 going furthest of all by working actual silver-foil collage into the surface to stand in for reflective glass. Different prints in the series passed through different hands entirely, Richard Ewen printing Mirror #3, Ron McPherson working Mirror #2 and #4, Ron Adams and Daniel Freeman on Mirror #9, each one embossed to give the glassy curve of the mirror's edge real physical presence on the sheet rather than relying on colour alone. The very first mirror Lichtenstein ever printed wasn't part of this group at all: Twin Mirrors, made in 1970 specifically for sale in the Guggenheim Museum's own bookstore alongside a companion print by Ellsworth Kelly, predates the main series by two years. He kept returning to the subject well after 1972, into sculpture later that decade and one final mirror print as late as 1990, but this nine-print group remains the core of the series.

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