Roy Lichtenstein Modern Head Series Prints For Sal

Modern Head began with a museum visit rather than a comic book. In 1968, Lichtenstein saw Alexei von Jawlensky's portrait head paintings at the Pasadena Art Museum, and that encounter became the starting point for a series built entirely around dismantling the human head into geometric planes borrowed from Cubism, Constructivism and Art Deco. Working with Gemini G.E.L. between the fall of 1969 and the fall of 1970, Lichtenstein produced five prints alongside two small sculptures and a relief, pushing the print side of the project into genuinely industrial territory: for Modern Head #4, Gemini went directly to Angell Manufacturing, a Los Angeles fabricator of decorative metal trim, to access the engraved, anodized aluminium finish needed to get the machined look Lichtenstein was after. As he put it himself, the aim was "to make a man look like a machine. It's the machine quality of the twenties and thirties that interests me."

That industrial ambition runs across the whole group, but the five prints don't share a single technique. Modern Head #3 is built from linocut with embossing, giving its black-and-white geometry a raised, tactile surface quite different from a flat screenprint, while Modern Head #5 uses graphite embossed with a hydraulic press, another genuinely unusual choice for an editioned print. Where the Haystack and Cathedral prints from the previous year took an existing painterly subject and rebuilt it in flat dots, Modern Head goes further, treating the printmaking process itself as part of the machine-age effect Lichtenstein was chasing, borrowing real industrial fabrication techniques rather than simply imitating their look.

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