Roy Lichtenstein Seven Apple Woodcut Series Prints For Sale

The Seven Apple Woodcuts trace back to 1980, when Roy Lichtenstein began painting still lifes built from loose, gestural apple shapes, a body of work that arrived at the print stage two years later as seven woodcuts cut from cherry blocks. The prints were made through a genuinely international collaboration: Michael Berdan, an American printer who had trained in Japan, worked from Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Shigemitsu Tsukaguchi, a master printer brought over from Japan, worked from Philadelphia, both contributing to the same series on handmade Japanese paper despite being based in different cities. First exhibited at Castelli Graphics in New York in November 1982, the sheets themselves carry a signed date of 1983, most likely a simple misremembering on Lichtenstein's part rather than a genuine discrepancy in when the work was made.

What makes the series interesting sits in the gap between how it looks and how it was actually built. Each apple appears to be rendered in quick, loose brushwork, the kind of unguarded gestural mark Abstract Expressionist painters treated as evidence of raw, unfiltered feeling, yet every one of those marks was carved deliberately into wood, printed, and repeated across an edition rather than made spontaneously by hand. Lichtenstein had spent his whole career questioning the idea that a painted gesture carries some kind of inherent authenticity, and here that argument gets pushed into a medium where the contradiction is even sharper: nothing about cutting cherry wood is loose or subconscious, yet the finished prints are convincing enough that the woodcut itself nearly disappears behind the illusion of a quick brushstroke.

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