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拍品专文
In the 1970s, after devoting the previous decade to the iconic comic-book paintings that launched his career as one of the founders of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein set the comic-book aside and turned to art history as his muse. In this, an exceptional example from Lichtenstein’s series of Purist Paintings, the artist cunningly interrogates the pared-down simplicity and machine-like precision of Purism, a style pioneered by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant in 1918. The Purists felt that Cubism had become too decorative—almost a pastiche of itself—and instead wanted a radically-simplified style purged of extraneous detail. With his typical insouciant flair, Lichtenstein renders the classic elements of the Purist still life—wine bottles, glasses, and a pitcher—as if passed through a Pop Art lens.
Lichtenstein created only thirteen purist still life paintings, of which several are now in important museum collections, including Purist Still Life (1975, The Broad, Los Angeles), Purist Still Life with Pitcher (1975, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), and Purist Painting with Bottles (1975, Wolverhampton Art Gallery). These paintings demonstrate the quick-witted artist’s ability to adapt and transform the many “isms” of art history into his own unique vernacular. Beginning in 1972, the artist tackled Cubism, trompe l'oeil paintings, and Futurism before arriving at Purism. “He finally liberated his style from the cartoon and became this classical painter, which he had always been,” the Lichtenstein scholar Joseph Helman explained (J. Helman, quoted in K. Rosenberg, “Lichtenstein: After the Funny Papers,” New York Times, June 11, 2010, p. C25).
In Purist Painting with Pitcher, Glass and Classical Column, Lichtenstein depicts a pitcher and wine bottle that rests atop a flat surface. The shadow that is cast by the bottle is rendered in black diagonal lines, which can be seen directly underneath the bottle, as if it’s been reflected in a shiny surface. Nearby, two martini glasses with a decorative, beveled design sit alongside a chianti bottle, where the edge of the bottle is actually formed by the stem of one of the glasses. Above that, an ionic Greek column seems to sit on the same table top as the pitcher. Now the painting takes on the appearance of a large-scale landscape painting, with the tabletop actually forming a horizon line, and the pitcher now oversized and standing as large as the column itself. This distorts the illusion of the table-top in favor of a strange, enormous landscape, not unlike Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of the same subject.
In the present work, Lichtenstein’s resolutely flat surface design mimics the three-dimensional roundness of the objects themselves but does so in a rather knowing manner. Here we see Lichtenstein conveying an accurate and recognizable sense of depth and three-dimensionality with a very limited set of means. The wine bottle and glasses somehow manage to be both transparent and flat at the same time, due to Lichtenstein’s clever use of gray and white to connote shadow and depth. "He reduced things down to three colors…. It was simple, basic things… He was feeling the constraints of the print process as a parameter, like writing a haiku or a sonnet…,” explained Jack Cowart, now the Director of the Lichtenstein Foundation (J. Cowart, “More than Meets the Eye,” in Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2003, p. 128).
According to the renowned critic Lawrence Alloway, Lichtenstein’s paintings at this time “can do two things—it can switch a comic book into fine art, or it can switch fine art back into comic style” (L. Alloway, "On Style: An Examination of Roy Lichtenstein's Development Despite a New Monograph on the Artist," Artforum, March 1972, p. 53). As in the present work, Lichtenstein has radically simplified the already pared-down simplicity of the Purist still life, using just a few colors and limiting his design to flat panels of color and diagonal cross-hatching. Like his signature Ben-Day dot—itself a shorthand used in the printing industry to connote roundness, depth and shadow—Lichtenstein use of diagonal hatching,
Lichtenstein created only thirteen purist still life paintings, of which several are now in important museum collections, including Purist Still Life (1975, The Broad, Los Angeles), Purist Still Life with Pitcher (1975, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), and Purist Painting with Bottles (1975, Wolverhampton Art Gallery). These paintings demonstrate the quick-witted artist’s ability to adapt and transform the many “isms” of art history into his own unique vernacular. Beginning in 1972, the artist tackled Cubism, trompe l'oeil paintings, and Futurism before arriving at Purism. “He finally liberated his style from the cartoon and became this classical painter, which he had always been,” the Lichtenstein scholar Joseph Helman explained (J. Helman, quoted in K. Rosenberg, “Lichtenstein: After the Funny Papers,” New York Times, June 11, 2010, p. C25).
In Purist Painting with Pitcher, Glass and Classical Column, Lichtenstein depicts a pitcher and wine bottle that rests atop a flat surface. The shadow that is cast by the bottle is rendered in black diagonal lines, which can be seen directly underneath the bottle, as if it’s been reflected in a shiny surface. Nearby, two martini glasses with a decorative, beveled design sit alongside a chianti bottle, where the edge of the bottle is actually formed by the stem of one of the glasses. Above that, an ionic Greek column seems to sit on the same table top as the pitcher. Now the painting takes on the appearance of a large-scale landscape painting, with the tabletop actually forming a horizon line, and the pitcher now oversized and standing as large as the column itself. This distorts the illusion of the table-top in favor of a strange, enormous landscape, not unlike Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of the same subject.
In the present work, Lichtenstein’s resolutely flat surface design mimics the three-dimensional roundness of the objects themselves but does so in a rather knowing manner. Here we see Lichtenstein conveying an accurate and recognizable sense of depth and three-dimensionality with a very limited set of means. The wine bottle and glasses somehow manage to be both transparent and flat at the same time, due to Lichtenstein’s clever use of gray and white to connote shadow and depth. "He reduced things down to three colors…. It was simple, basic things… He was feeling the constraints of the print process as a parameter, like writing a haiku or a sonnet…,” explained Jack Cowart, now the Director of the Lichtenstein Foundation (J. Cowart, “More than Meets the Eye,” in Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2003, p. 128).
According to the renowned critic Lawrence Alloway, Lichtenstein’s paintings at this time “can do two things—it can switch a comic book into fine art, or it can switch fine art back into comic style” (L. Alloway, "On Style: An Examination of Roy Lichtenstein's Development Despite a New Monograph on the Artist," Artforum, March 1972, p. 53). As in the present work, Lichtenstein has radically simplified the already pared-down simplicity of the Purist still life, using just a few colors and limiting his design to flat panels of color and diagonal cross-hatching. Like his signature Ben-Day dot—itself a shorthand used in the printing industry to connote roundness, depth and shadow—Lichtenstein use of diagonal hatching,