'As I Opened Fire' After Roy Lichtenstein, Artist Signed, Pop Art, Comic Strip, Art Students League, Venice Biennale

Description

'As I Opened Fire' triptych, offset-lithograph poster after the original painting by Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) in the collection of … more 'As I Opened Fire' triptych, offset-lithograph poster after the original painting by Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Signed in pencil by the artist, lower right of right hand panel, 'Roy Lichtenstein' and printed circa 1988.

Published by the Stedelijk Museum with publisher's imprint "Copyright S.M.A." printed on each sheet lower right within image. Printer: Drukkerij Luii & Co., Amsterdam, Netherlands. Artwork and printing information printed, verso, lower left and lower right of each sheet.

Publishing information lower right, verso, on each sheet:
"edition and color-correction
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
(copyright) R. Lichtenstein 1964 c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam
printed in the nederlands"

painting information lower left, verso, on each sheet:
"Roy Lichtenstein 1923
as i opened fire
1964 - acryl on canvas
triptych - panel (#) - 173 x 142 1/2 cm.
coll. stedelijk museum amsterdam"

Overall size of triptych: 25.25 x 62.64 inches
Sheet size (each): 25.25 x 20.88 inches
Image size (each): approx. 24.25 x 19.75 inches

Roy Lichtenstein first studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the College of the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an MFA in 1949. In 1951, the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract paintings of the Old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family.

From 1957 to 1960, Lichtenstein held a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego. By then, he had begun to include loosely drawn cartoon characters in his increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in New Jersey while teaching at Douglass Residential College, a division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick. During this formative period, he exchanged ideas with other artists including Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, and Robert Whitman, all of whom were experimenting with different types of art that were based on everyday life. In 1961, Lichtenstein began to create paintings that consisted exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Ben Day-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons and also began to incorporate images cropped from advertisements. From 1964 onwards, he successively depicted stylized landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of paintings by famous artists, geometric elements from Art Deco design (in the Modern series), parodies of the Abstract Expressionists’ style (in the Brushstrokes series), and explosions. They all underlined the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Lichtenstein addressed these questions more formally with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. From 1974 through the 1980s, he probed another long-standing interest: the concept of artistic style. The series of works from this period played with the characteristics of well-known, 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990's series Interiors, which included images of his own works as both decorative and structural elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist explored a variety of other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and graphic media including serigraphy.

Beginning in 1962, New York's Leo Castelli Gallery held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Lichtenstein also participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honored with solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum (1967) and the Guggenheim Museum (1968). He was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994.
(biographical information courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Reference:
"The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1948-1997" - Corlett App. 5, page 324; "Lichtenstein Posters" - Döring/Osten No. 14, page 114; et al. less