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Lot Essay
Throughout his extensive artistic career Roy Lichtenstein created a remarkable and unusual sculptural oeuvre. Lichtenstein worked consistently in three dimensions, executing works which are clever commentaries on visual perception. At the same time, sculptures like the present work revive elements of his earlier paintings as well as redirect the celebrated art of his predecessors in shockingly inventive ways.
In their visual complexities and compressed physicality, Lichtenstein's sculptures are, according to Naomi Spector, "concrete versions of the artist's basic graphic painting techniques. Ironies abound, Lichtenstein's signature lines become three-dimensional and concrete, and the painted and patinated bronze sculptures are as inescapably pictorial as the paintings. The crucial difference is that the spaces we 'read' on canvases are real in the sculptures. . . .But with both the concrete and the insubstantial, everything depends on the precision of the image, and here Lichtenstein is the master" (N. Spector, "Plane Talk: Notes on Roy Lichtenstein's Sculptures," Lichtenstein: Sculpture and Drawings, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 33).
As has often been noted, the present work, establishes a dialogue with the paintings of Henri Matisse by reviving one of the French master's most recognizable motifs. As Spector has noted, Lichtenstein's versions of this theme reveal clever reworking of the devices of illusionistic painting so the image of the goldfish and bowl becomes a visual puzzle: "Lichtenstein knows how sparks of instantaneous connections flash between the eye and the mind. . . . [H]e arranges for the image we know from Matisse's painting Goldfish and Palette, 1914, to read as a cylinder, even though this sculpture is almost completely planar" (Ibid.).
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, 1914, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx.
In their visual complexities and compressed physicality, Lichtenstein's sculptures are, according to Naomi Spector, "concrete versions of the artist's basic graphic painting techniques. Ironies abound, Lichtenstein's signature lines become three-dimensional and concrete, and the painted and patinated bronze sculptures are as inescapably pictorial as the paintings. The crucial difference is that the spaces we 'read' on canvases are real in the sculptures. . . .But with both the concrete and the insubstantial, everything depends on the precision of the image, and here Lichtenstein is the master" (N. Spector, "Plane Talk: Notes on Roy Lichtenstein's Sculptures," Lichtenstein: Sculpture and Drawings, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 33).
As has often been noted, the present work, establishes a dialogue with the paintings of Henri Matisse by reviving one of the French master's most recognizable motifs. As Spector has noted, Lichtenstein's versions of this theme reveal clever reworking of the devices of illusionistic painting so the image of the goldfish and bowl becomes a visual puzzle: "Lichtenstein knows how sparks of instantaneous connections flash between the eye and the mind. . . . [H]e arranges for the image we know from Matisse's painting Goldfish and Palette, 1914, to read as a cylinder, even though this sculpture is almost completely planar" (Ibid.).
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, 1914, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx.