Roy Lichtenstein was 70 years old when he approached the female nude for the first time in his career, one of the oldest and most heavily worked subjects in the entire history of Western art, arriving at it only in the final years of his life. He was disarmingly honest about how little premeditation went into the choice: "I don't really know why I chose nudes. I'd never done them before, so that was maybe something, but I also felt chiaroscuro would look good on a body." Rather than working from life, Lichtenstein went back to his own 1960s source material, pulling figures from the pages of romance comics, including a specific issue of Girls' Romances from November 1963, and imagining the clothed women in those panels undressed. He gave a second, more considered explanation for the subject in a 1994 newspaper interview: "It was a good excuse to contrast undulating and volumetric form with rigid geometry."
The technique shifted as much as the subject did. In a 1997 interview, Lichtenstein described using his Ben-Day dots in a genuinely new way here, not just as flat pattern but as a kind of chiaroscuro, explaining that the dots let him combine figure and background within a shadowed area without being confined to a single fixed outline, since "the subject matter excuse for this is that it's a shadow. And that's interesting to me." That shift shows up clearly across the series: his usually crisp black contour lines recede and partially dissolve, and where his 1960s comic heroines were built from a single cartoon panel each, several of the Nudes prints combine women drawn from multiple different panels into one composite figure, giving compositions like Nudes with Beach Ball a deliberately disjointed, spliced-together quality.
Nine prints made up the finished series, work beginning with collages in Lichtenstein's New York studio in the spring of 1993, hand-cut stencils that December, and his first workshop visit in February 1994. The results are frank about their own artificiality rather than aiming for anything tasteful or restrained, deliberately kitsch in a way that leans into the pulpy comic-book source rather than smoothing it over, and the same techniques and compositional ideas developed here carried directly through into the final years of Lichtenstein's career before his death in 1997.
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