Lot125 N11733 Roy Lichtenstein Modern Painting Triptych II
"Today, finally, even the hegemony of âcultureâ is dissolving... and weâre back to the issue of whatâs good and whatâs bad, regardless. This leaves paintings like Lichtensteinâs Modern Paintings alive in the eternal present as singular confrontational objects...They donât give themselves up or let you go.â
Roy Lichtensteinâs unmistakable graphic vocabulary crystallizes into scarlet, yellow, and ultramarine geometry, arching and interlocking into an urban panorama: Modern Painting Triptych II. Here, the steel ornamentation and industrial ligaturesâjoints of sleek new feats in engineeringâof Manhattanâs Art Deco skyline are synthesized and recast in broad passages of primary-colored Ben-Day dots. Modern Painting Triptych II is one of 48 paintings which constitute the Modern Paintings series; of the just six multipanel works, including the present work, half belong in prestigious institutional collects ions: the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Ryobi Foundation, Carbondale. Lichtensteinâs discoveries in the Modern Paintings would prove so formative that they would form the basis of his next body of work: the repetition of forms in Modern Painting Triptych II anticipates the series of Modular Paintings to follow, whose duplicating compositional grids developed upon these same themes of mechanization and seriality in the industry age. Further test.mes nt to its significance in Lichtensteinâs oeuvre, Modern Painting Triptych II bears an extraordinary exhibition history, from its 1967 debut in Lichtensteinâs solo presentation at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery to an extended loan at the National collects ion of Replica Handbags s, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Just as Art Deco fused Futurism, Cubism, de Stil, and ancient.mes sopotamia and Mesoamerica, taking old and new to create an architecture for present, Lichtenstein, too, proves himself to be an architect of his t.mes through his triumphant Modern Paintings.
Lichtenstein created his first Modern Paintings in 1966, four decades after the earliest Art Deco projects began studding the Manhattan skyline. Art Deco, unveiled at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts DĂ©coratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, was the style that gave New York City, where Lichtenstein lived and worked, its character and cadence: from the Empire State to the Chrysler, the most iconic buildings boasted a novel decorative quality and towering verticality. Yet just as the style became the face of twentieth-century modernity, Modernism outpaced itâWilliam Van Alen and Raymond Hood were usurped by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Louis Kahn, whose glass-encased constructions made the vanguard of just a few thirty years prior feel dated.
With his characteristic levity, Lichtenstein now parodized the vernacular of so-called modernity, his painterly pastiches engineering a reconciliation of once-spectacular innovation with Pop ingenuity. âWhat is particularly unnerving about the series is what is most relevant to the subject of Modernism versus Postmodernism,â David Antin observes, âThe pathos of Modern Art is particular to itself⊠It was the specific claim of âmodernismâ to be finally and forever open. That was its âfuturism,â and now that its future has receded into the past it can be had as a sealed package whose contents have the exotic look of something released from a t.mes capsule.â (David Antin, âModernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,â boundary 2, Iss. 1, 1972, p. 99) Modern Painting Triptych II thus stylizes the already stylized, retrofitting the bygone past for the future.
Modern Paintings in Museum collects ions
âWhat is particularly unnerving about the series is what is most relevant to the subject of modernism versus postmodernism⊠The pathos of Modern Art is particular to itself. There is after all nothing pathetic about Baroque or Victorian Art. But it was the specific claim of "modernism" to be finally and forever open. That was its "futurism," and now that its future has receded into the past it can be had as a sealed package whose contents have the exotic look of something released from a t.mes capsule."
The primary palette and geometric composition of Modern Painting Tripych II also obliquely appropriates the advents of such renowned de Stijl artists as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesberg. Lichtenstein wrestled at length with Mondrianâs work in particular, interrogating the dissonance between Mondrianâs utopian notions of structure and order and the political unrest that underpinned the period of their creation. Modern Painting Triptych II embodies Lichtensteinâs examination of this distinctly Modern turbulence beneath the pristine surface of the two-dimensional canvasâ visual register, and his output would only continue to invest further and further into a dialogue with the history, criticism, and methodology of art. What began as a recontextualization of kitsch, everyday iconography would evolve into an unerring investigation of his predecessors in the paintings to follow. But the Modern Paintings reveal an early and prognostic engagement with art history in real-t.mes : the quotidian imagery of consumer goods and comic book scenes of hopeful, hopeless war and romance through which he found his artistic footing would usher him toward the architectural polemics of the world around him. In this way Modern Painting Triptych II rests firmly on the bedrock of Lichtensteinâs artistic enterpriseâan undiscriminating embrace of art and imagery and subverting the associations of taste bound to them.
"Lichtensteinâs new paintings and sculptures are trophies of the 30s; trophies in the sense of mementos and memorials annexed from somebody else. In this case, the other is the form-sense of a preceding period.â
Though the Modern Paintings sought new inspiration in metropolitan America, they stand as representations of Lichtensteinâs extant commitment to seeing the world as it is and painting it anew. Though fast dated, the Art Deco ecosystem that shaped New York would, Lichtenstein made sure, remain forever relevant. âFrom ash-tray to movie-theater foyer,â Lawrence Alloway notes, âthe 30s are with us; as places to go, objects to use, the products of the period are a known, though [sic.] unvalued, part of our environment. They are definitely one of our common, non-esoteric fields of reference. Lichtensteinâs new paintings and sculptures are trophies of the 30s; trophies in the sense of mementos and memorials annexed from somebody else. In this case, the other is the form-sense of a preceding period.â (Lawrence Alloway quoted in: Exh. Cat., Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center, Roy Lichtenstein: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, December 1967 - January 1968, n.p.) Thus, Modern Painting Triptych II not only encapsulates Lichtensteinâs compelling question of taste and aesthetics but challenges how artistic inventionâeven those close in the rearview of the avant-gardeâcan be traced, disrupted, and forever reinvented.
