Roy Lichtenstein

(American, 1923-1997)

Nude Reading, from Nudes series

Footnotes

Provenance
Alan Cristea Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes, 15 February - 11 March 1995, London; where purchased by the current owner.

The Nudes series is one of three emblematic series Lichtenstein worked on towards the end of his life. Inspired by the same comic book imagery from the early 1960s, when he first ventured into the subject, his return to the nude was also said to have been inspired by Pablo Picasso's later work that focused on the female nude. Two exhibitions held in New-York at the time might have had an effect on Lichtenstein: Picasso and the Weeping Women: Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Mar (Metropolitan Museum, 1994), and Picasso and Portraiture (Museum of Modern Art, 1996).

In this series, Lichtenstein also returned to the Benday dots that made his name, and for Nude Reading experimented with a contemporary form of chiaroscuro. Printers at Tyler Graphics cut out stencils in irregular shapes and, for the first time, the artist introduced digital technology in his art, working with dye-cut stencils generated by a computer.

The comic-strip nudes, deceptively simple and somehow voyeuristic at first were in fact, as often with Lichtenstein, a way to address a more complex pictorial problem: that of composition in the relationship between sinuous forms and rigid lines. As he famously said:

My purpose is entirely aesthetic, and relationships and unity are the thing I'm really after.