Roy Lichtenstein gave a full account of where the Reflection Series actually came from, and it started with a failed photograph, not a painting: "It started when I tried to photograph a print by Robert Rauschenberg that was under glass. But the light from a window reflected on the surface of the glass and prevented me from taking a good picture. But it gave me the idea of photographing fairly well-known works under glass, where the reflection would hide most of the work, but you could still make out what the subject was. Well, I tried to do a few photographs in this manner; but I am not much of a photographer." Unable to make the idea work through the camera, Lichtenstein turned it into paint instead, beginning a series of Reflection paintings in 1988 built specifically around his own earlier works: "Later the idea occurred to me to do the same idea in painting; and I started this series on various early works of mine." Seven prints followed between 1989 and 1990, each one reaching back into a different corner of Roy Lichtenstein's own career for its underlying image, a crashing fighter plane, a conversation between comic-book lovers, a brushstroke, a superhero, a comic-strip blonde, rather than borrowing from an outside comic strip or another artist's painting the way so much of his earlier work had.
Getting the illusion of glass and light to hold up on paper took real technical range. Reflections on Crash, according to the official catalogue raisonné, combines lithography, screenprint, relief and metalized PVC collage with embossing, meaning part of the reflective streak across the image isn't printed ink at all, it's an actual sheet of metallic plastic collaged onto the surface, catching real light the way a genuine glass reflection would. Roy Lichtenstein was blunt about what all this technical effort was actually in service of: "Of course the reflections are just an excuse to make an abstract work, with the cartoon image being supposedly partly hidden by the reflections." Reflections on Brushstrokes pushes that idea furthest of all, taking a gesture already translated once from spontaneous mark into flat printed dots decades earlier, now obscured behind a second, equally manufactured layer of glass and glare, built from precisely the same Ben-Day dots and mechanical technique as everything underneath it.
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