Cathedral #1, from the Cathedral Series

Reflecting nearly four hundred years of construction, Rouen Cathedral has a particularly striking and architecturally complex west facade. In the 1890s, Claude Monet captured its sculptural qualities as they changed under different light conditions in a series of more than thirty paintings. In 1968, taking these works as inspiration, Lichtenstein began to examine the subject further in both painting and print. Working in his famous Ben-Day dot style, he explored how to achieve starkly different effects through calibrated changes within a minimal palette, taking advantage of visual effects such as color vibration and optical mixing. Instead of the subtle nuances of Monet’s daybreak-to-dusk cycle, Lichtenstein’s works represent an amplified progression from light to dark that simultaneously reads as an exercise in abstraction.