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拍品专文
With its bold, authoritative contrast and clean, crisp lines, Roy Lichtenstein’s George Washington is an important early drawing from a founding father of American Pop Art. Marking a defining moment in the artist’s career, when he fully committed to his mature Pop style—both in his subject matter and technical application—George Washington traces the American lineage of art history from Gilbert Stuart to one of the most celebrated movements in post-war art. Drawn with graphite pencil, this rare early work reveals the hand of an otherwise mechanically pristine artist, unveiling the artistic process that would both inform the larger painted canvas and stand firmly as an important artwork in its own right.
This period marked a momentous moment of transformation for the 38-year-old artist, who had been exhibiting his Cubist and Abstract Expressionist-style paintings across New York for a decade. Influenced by the art of Allan Kaprow, George Segal, and Claes Oldenburg, which incorporated everyday objects and popular culture, Lichtenstein turned to an entirely new imagery culled from the contemporary world of advertisements and comic books. During this period, he also began to incorporate the graphic techniques of commercial illustrators into his own practice.
In 2010, Lichtenstein’s drawings, including George Washington, received a major retrospective at New York's Morgan Library and Museum, which, for the first time, underscored the quality and significance of his drawings. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Isabelle Deveraux describes Lichtenstein’s drawings as “the most original contribution of Pop Art to the history of drawing” (I. Deveraux, "Baked Potatoes, Hot Dogs and Girls' Romances: Roy Lichtenstein's Master Drawings," in Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings 1961-1968, exh. cat., Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2011, p. 15).
George Washington is an early Pop work by the artist, created while he was focusing on black-and-white, single-object paintings of ordinary commercial objects, such as Curtains in the Saint Louis Museum of Art, Desk Calendar at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as some of his earliest comic strip paintings. Based on a woodcut of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of the first American president found in a Hungarian national newspaper—which likewise recalls Stuart’s famous Athenaeum Portrait on the US one-dollar bill—the subject matter of George Washington poignantly bridges old and new in the artist’s oeuvre.
During the early 1950s, while still working in a visual language more closely aligned to the European avant-garde, Lichtenstein began satirizing scenes from early Americana. Most famously, in 1951, he painted two rudimentary versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware after the German American Emanuel Leutze’s iconic scene. Fast forward a decade, and the artist’s early parodies of revolution transformed into comic strip depictions of aerial warfare. Moreover, by 1962, Lichtenstein expanded his repertoire of art-historical sources, elevating the likes of Gilbert Stuart to that of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne. In so doing, Lichtenstein acknowledged that, while the American artist’s name may be relatively unknown beyond art circles, Stuart’s depiction of George Washington is as commonplace as the most elite modern European masters.
This period marked a momentous moment of transformation for the 38-year-old artist, who had been exhibiting his Cubist and Abstract Expressionist-style paintings across New York for a decade. Influenced by the art of Allan Kaprow, George Segal, and Claes Oldenburg, which incorporated everyday objects and popular culture, Lichtenstein turned to an entirely new imagery culled from the contemporary world of advertisements and comic books. During this period, he also began to incorporate the graphic techniques of commercial illustrators into his own practice.
In 2010, Lichtenstein’s drawings, including George Washington, received a major retrospective at New York's Morgan Library and Museum, which, for the first time, underscored the quality and significance of his drawings. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Isabelle Deveraux describes Lichtenstein’s drawings as “the most original contribution of Pop Art to the history of drawing” (I. Deveraux, "Baked Potatoes, Hot Dogs and Girls' Romances: Roy Lichtenstein's Master Drawings," in Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings 1961-1968, exh. cat., Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2011, p. 15).
George Washington is an early Pop work by the artist, created while he was focusing on black-and-white, single-object paintings of ordinary commercial objects, such as Curtains in the Saint Louis Museum of Art, Desk Calendar at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as some of his earliest comic strip paintings. Based on a woodcut of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of the first American president found in a Hungarian national newspaper—which likewise recalls Stuart’s famous Athenaeum Portrait on the US one-dollar bill—the subject matter of George Washington poignantly bridges old and new in the artist’s oeuvre.
During the early 1950s, while still working in a visual language more closely aligned to the European avant-garde, Lichtenstein began satirizing scenes from early Americana. Most famously, in 1951, he painted two rudimentary versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware after the German American Emanuel Leutze’s iconic scene. Fast forward a decade, and the artist’s early parodies of revolution transformed into comic strip depictions of aerial warfare. Moreover, by 1962, Lichtenstein expanded his repertoire of art-historical sources, elevating the likes of Gilbert Stuart to that of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne. In so doing, Lichtenstein acknowledged that, while the American artist’s name may be relatively unknown beyond art circles, Stuart’s depiction of George Washington is as commonplace as the most elite modern European masters.