Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes

This book was published on the occasion of Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, the first exhibition devoted solely to Roy Lichtenstein’s still-life paintings, sculptures, and drawings, which were made between 1972 and the early 1980s. These works marked a shift in the artist’s work from the 1960s, as he moved from comics to historical paintings as sources, riffing on seventeenth-century Dutch and nineteenth-century American still lifes as well as modernist revisitations of the genre by artists such as Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. Lichtenstein adapted still-life motifs and compositions in a distinctive style of vivid color, hard lines, and flattened forms that evokes both the aesthetic of commercial printing and signifiers of his own earlier work.

The fully illustrated catalogue presents the forty-nine paintings, six sculptures, and eighteen drawings in the exhibition, as well as archival photography of the artist’s studio and an actual-size reproduction of one of Lichtenstein’s composition notebooks containing clippings he gathered as source material. It also includes the essay “Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Lifes: Conversations with Art History” by John Wilmerding, an interview with collector and dealer Joe Helman by Mark Francis, and a photographic contribution by artist Louise Lawler.