Mirror #1 poignantly encapsulates Roy Lichtenstein’s capacity to engage with canonical art historical concerns through the signs and symbols of twentieth-century consumer culture and, in doing so, raise complex conceptual questions about art and illusion. Lichtenstein’s oeuvre is predicated on a semiotic investigation of the ways in which systems of representation allow us to conceptualize and interpret the world around us. Between 1969 and 1972, Lichtenstein produced a finite collects ion of Mirror paintings, through which he engaged with the representational strategies and tropes of mirrored surfaces in art history and contemporary advertising. The second painting in the series, Mirror #1 helped inaugurate one of the most significant symbolic programs of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, which would persist as a sign of artifice and illusion in his forthcoming bodies of work.

In the latter half of the 1960s, Lichtenstein devoted his practice to reinterpreting icons of art history through his signature Pop Art lexicon, rooted in the aesthetic strategies of twentieth-century mass production and consumer branding. After exploring canonical art historical periods, such as Classical Antiquity, Impressionism, and Cubism, Lichtenstein considered one of the most iconic and technically challenging motifs of Western painting since the Renaissance: the mirror.

“In the Mirror paintings, Lichtenstein did not depart from his system of formal elements derived from his first comic-strip paintings but used it for very different ends. He continued to rely on the look of a painting as a reproduction of an original but refined the elements and altered the concept just enough to apply them to an exploration of abstraction. Now that he established his system of codes, he was free to improvise on any subject” (Diane Waldman, “Mirrors, 1969-72, And Entablatures, 1971-76,” Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1993, p. 189).

The Mirror series perfectly epitomizes the conflict between reality and illusion that underpins Lichtenstein’s entire oeuvre. First inspired by the ways in which advertisers represented windows and mirrors on commercial brochures and in storefront posters, Lichtenstein embarked on an examination of the semiotic systems enabling the mirror to operate as a vehicle for illusion and artifice. Evacuating the series of all figurative reference, Lichtenstein situated the concept of illusion as the subject of his paintings.

For each painting from the Mirror series, Lichtenstein uniquely interspersed his signature Ben Day dots, which refer to the mass-production technique used by newspaper printers, with streaks of solid color in order to achieve the effect of a reflective surface. Mimicking consumer advertisements, Lichtenstein used simplified lines and airbrush-like shading to suggest the idea of a reflection. The first painting in the series, which bears the same title as the present work, is an ovular composition held in the venerated collects ion of The Broad. In the present work, Lichtenstein maintains the same color palette as The Broad’s painting, but uniquely displays a rectangular, rather than tondo or ovular frame as was the most common in the series. A screen of meticulously rendered white Ben Day dots suffuse Mirror #1 as beautiful undulating designs around the hard edges of the frame produce the appearance of light glimmering off its shiny surface.

The smooth waves on the mirror’s surface also recall Lichtenstein’s oft-cited first Pop Art painting, Look Mickey, 1961. In the work, Donald Duck leans over the edge of the dock above the water – like Narcissus gazing at his reflection. The ripples of Look Mickey resurface in the compositions of Lichtenstein’s Mirrors as well as in the reflective surfaces of his later Reflections series. The rectangular composition of the present work also recalls an iconic painting from Lichtenstein’s Girl series, Him, 1964, which depicts the viewer as a woman gazing into a framed photograph of a man. The Mirror paintings were of paramount importance to the arc of Lichtenstein’s artistic development, enabling him to singularly focus on notions of artifice and illusion that sustained the following two decades of his career.

Although Lichtenstein’s compositions are most obviously rooted in twentieth-century commercial aesthetic norms, the artist also engaged in a dialogue with canonical art historical conventions. Since the Renaissance, the mirror has appeared in the works of esteemed artists as a form of self-portraiture. Famously, artists such as Parmigianino, Jan van Eyck, and Frida Kahlo have utilized the mirror as a means to insert themselves in the picture plane and contend with ideas of self-perception. Unlike his predecessors, Lichtenstein does not reflect any specific figurative presence in his Mirrors, but instead allows for multiple possible interpretations of what lies beyond the reflective surface. The mesmerizing patterning of black and white Ben Day dots in Mirror #1 produces an incredible sense of depth and vacancy that convinces the viewer of the space beyond the mirror.

In addition to a form of portraiture, the mirror in art history has also operated as a conceptual reference to the inherent illusion of the picture plane. In van Eyck’s celebrated Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 and Diego Velázquez’s renowned Las Meninas, 1656, the artists use the mirror to identify the perspective of the viewer and, in doing so, suggest the fundamental artificiality of the composition. Borrowing from the production methods of twentieth-century mass media, Lichtenstein’s practice explores representation and illusion in the modern day. His Comic Strips, Girls, Interiors, and Mirrors series engage the viewer in the ways in which contemporary commercial culture creates a false sense of reality for the consumer. Transfixingly beautiful and precisely rendered, Mirror #1 perfectly embodies the underlying concerns of Lichtenstein’s career: to examine the signs and symbols that give meaning to contemporary life.

The gravity of the Mirror series within Lichtenstein’s oeuvre is only further accentuated by Lichtenstein’s choice of the mirror for his 1978 Self-Portrait. Floating atop a bodiless T-shirt, a rectangular mirror supplants the artist’s head. Rather than the ovular and tondo formats which were most common in the series, Lichtenstein represents himself with the rectangular single-panel, akin to the present work. Though the Mirror series itself spanned 1969-1972, the motif persisted in the remaining twenty-five years of Lichtenstein’s life. Mirror #1 is a rare and seminal example from one of the most conceptually driven and influential series within Lichtenstein’s oeuvre.