Return to "Roy Lichtenstein" main page

Images from the Installation
The curvaceous bronze Galatea (1990) gets her form from a single narrowing line that begins at her base and describes her torso as three ovalsa belly and two breasts. From these the line continues upward to suggest the abstracted silhouette of a head seen at a slight angle. The line culminates in a wavy tress of blond hair outlined in the cartoonlike style Lichtenstein used for decades in painting and sculpture to depict brushstrokes. It is not known whether Lichtenstein had in mind the mythical Galatea, a sea nymph pursued by Polyphemus while she was in love with Acis, or whether he was thinking of the slightly later mythical Galatea whom the celebrated sculptor Pygmalion fashioned into an ivory statue so beautiful that he fell in love with her and the gods arranged for her to come to life. It is probably not significant, for Lichtenstein was more interested in issues of form than in allusions to stories. The forms in this work do appear to resemble Picasso's paintings of 1932 of his nubile mistress Marie Thérèse Walter. Perhaps at some distance Lichtenstein's Galatea also refers to a work often on view in New York museums, the voluptuous Standing Woman (1927) fashioned by the French-born American sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Lichtenstein has given his flat Galatea an illusion of roundnessand thus volumeusing several amusing means: the slanting parallel lines of red bronze that fill the contours of her belly and breasts signal conventions used in painting for shading or modeling, and three short cylinders protrude from these ovals to act as nipples and a belly button. Also, with the reverse curve of her single supporting leg, counterbalanced by her off-center belly, Lichtenstein hints that Galatea is standing in a posture of contrapposto, a pose in which one part of the body is twisted in the opposite direction from the other part. This stance, too, implies volume.
In Lichtenstein's Brushstroke Nude (1993) contrapposto is exaggerated to the point that the female figurered and white on one side, blue and white on the other, mirror-image sidehas the appearance of a fashion model twisting to show her outfit as she minces down the runway. Although Brushstroke Nude is composed of elementsprofile head, arms, torso, and feetthat are thin relative to the height and width of the sculpture, the work becomes volumetric because of the torque of the body and because exaggerated Benday dots, one of Lichtenstein's cues for roundness, suggestively fill her concavities.
Two other emphatically vertical sculptures, Brushstrokes (1996) and Endless Drip (1995), are cousins to Lichtenstein's many renderings of brushstrokes in paintings and sculpture. Brushstrokes (1996), a mock Constructivist sculpture, splays over twenty-nine feet tall. Endless Drip revives a characteristic of certain Lichtenstein sculptures of the late 1970s, in which the materialization of something evanescent, such as bronze steam rising from a sculptural coffee cup or bronze light beams cast by an overhead sculptural lamp, is conspicuous. The title of the work refers to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi's famous Endless Column (ca. 1920), a work of repeating identical wooden rhomboids that add up to potentially infinite height. Lichtenstein's Endless Drip also resembles a figure, perhaps a slippery bronze personnage by the French-German sculptor Hans Arp.
Coup de Chapeau II (1996), a flat bronze work, harks back to the vocabulary of Lichtenstein's Pop paintings. A cloud at the base leads to a swoosh of wind that becomes an explosion, reminiscent of those in paintings and low reliefs of the 1960s. The hat at the top, taken from Dagwood Bumstead's hat in the cartoon "Blondie," is knocked off the head of a figure the viewer does not see. The French words of the title are slang for "tip of the hat," or a salute. The French word coup literally means a blow or a strike, which suggests the force of the explosion.
Among Lichtenstein's last works were several House sculptures. These evolved from his large-scale Interior paintings of the early 1990s and from work on an unresolved project with the technology of hologram projection that revived the artist's interest in play with inverted perspective. When the viewer observes House III (1997) on the Roof, it appears that the corner of the house projects forward, toward us. However, by walking around the work, we observe that the corner actually recedes, that our eyes have been fooled. The Museum provided landscaping for the sculpture, in accord with the artist's intention that House III be seen on a slight rise. The "folds" in the window curtains once again resemble brushstrokes, Lichtenstein's code for art itself.
Installation Organizer
"Lichtenstein on the Roof" was coordinated by Nan Rosenthal, senior consultant in the Department of Modern Art.