'Abstract', Signed by Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Art Exhibition Poster, Guggenheim, Venice Biennale, Clef

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Vintage, 1987, Smithsonian exhibition poster for the Hirshhorn Museum; signed, lower right, in pencil, 'R. Lichtenstein' for Roy Lichtenstein (American, … Read more Vintage, 1987, Smithsonian exhibition poster for the Hirshhorn Museum; signed, lower right, in pencil, 'R. Lichtenstein' for Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) and accompanied by certificate of authenticity.

Printed legend, lower left, 'Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Painting with Clef, 1967. Oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 100 1/8 x 180 3/8 inches. Gift of Joseph H. Hishhorn, 1972.'
Printed, lower right, '(c) 1987 Smithsonian Institution. Poster Originals, Limited No. 497'

Provenance: a private San Francisco Estate

Roy Lichtenstein first studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York and subsequently with Hoyt Sherman at the College of the Arts at Ohio State University. Lichtenstein served in the U.S. Army from 1943-46, after which he resumed his studies, obtaining his 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, Lichtenstein moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family.

In 1957, he obtained a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego which he held until 1960. By then, he had begun to integrate loosely-drawn cartoon characters into what were becoming increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960-63, Lichtenstein lived in New Jersey and taught at Rutgers University. Here, he mingled with artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert Whitman, all of whom were experimenting with different kinds of art based on the artefacts of everyday life. In 1961, Lichtenstein began to create paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, introduced his signature Benday-dot grounds, commercial lettering, and text-balloons; he also began to incorporate cropped advertisements. In 1964, he began to depict a wide variety of 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. In all these choices, he emphasized the contradictions of representing three-dimensional elements on a flat surface.

In the early 1970s, Lichtenstein explored these themes further with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. From 1974 through the 1980s, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series Interiors, which included images of his own works as decorative 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 also worked in a variety of other mediums including polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs.

From 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York held regular exhibitions of Lichtenstein's work. He was also invited to participate in the 1966 Venice Biennale and was honored with numerous solo exhibitions including at the Pasadena Art Museum (1967) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1968) among others. Three years before his death, the artist was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994. See less