Roy Lichtenstein Six Still Lifes Series Prints For Sale

Still life had been treated as one of art's quieter genres for centuries, a form built around mood and meaning rather than drama, with Dutch and Flemish painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries using arrangements of fruit, flowers and household objects to sneak in symbolism about mortality, wealth and the passage of time beneath what looked like straightforward observation. Roy Lichtenstein started painting still lifes in 1972 and moved the subject into print two years later, producing six lithograph and screenprint sheets at Styria Studio in New York, each one working through a different corner of the genre, a figurine, a lobster, a pitcher of flowers, a portrait propped against fruit, a windmill, a single yellow arrangement. He was blunt about how little reverence he had for the tradition he was borrowing from: "When we think of still lifes, we think of paintings that have a certain atmosphere or ambiance. My still life paintings have none of those qualities, they just have pictures of certain things that are in a still life, like lemons and grapefruits and so forth. It's not meant to have the usual still life meaning." That refusal to romanticise the subject is exactly what makes the series work, stripping out centuries of accumulated symbolism and leaving only the checklist of recognisable objects, rendered with the flat, emotionally neutral clarity of commercial printing rather than any painterly mood.

Technically, the series stands apart from most of Lichtenstein's other 1970s print work in one specific way: it barely uses his signature Ben-Day dots at all, leaning instead on dense fields of stripes to carry texture and tone across six separate colour runs per sheet. Each print was signed, numbered and dated by Lichtenstein in an edition of 100 plus 14 artist's proofs, and together the six form a kind of survey of what a still life could contain, food, decorative objects, even a portrait folded into the arrangement, without any of them settling into the quiet, contemplative register the genre traditionally promises.

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