Roy Lichtenstein Paintings Series For Sale

The Paintings Series arrived in 1984, but the groundwork for it stretches back a decade earlier, to a run of Cubist Still Life paintings Roy Lichtenstein made between 1973 and 1975, directly referencing specific works by Juan Gris and mixing real sand from the beach near his Southampton studio into silver paint to fake the collaged textures of Synthetic Cubism. Sotheby's has described those paintings as a genuine act of pre-emption, sampling and reworking existing art-historical images nearly two decades before that kind of appropriation became its own recognised movement through artists like Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. By the time the eight Paintings prints followed in 1984, made through woodcut, lithography and screenprint, Lichtenstein had spent years testing exactly how far a picture could depict another picture before the two became impossible to separate.

That question runs through the whole series, and one image in particular carried it further than the rest. Two Paintings: Sleeping Muse, from 1984, traces back to a monumental painting and sculpture shown together at Leo Castelli Gallery the year before, both built around the same reclining figure. The composition kept resurfacing long after: a collage study and the original painting in 1983, this print in 1984, and, remarkably, a bronze sculpture edition fabricated in 2021, nearly a quarter-century after Lichtenstein's death, made directly from his own original designs. One image, four different physical forms, spread across almost forty years. Several prints in the group stack a depicted painting inside its own frame, that frame inside a rendered wall or interior, building a picture entirely out of nested representations rather than any single flat image, Lichtenstein using the printed medium specifically to depict painting as a subject rather than as the process actually producing what's on the sheet.

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