Roy Lichtenstein’s Small House from 1997 is a test.mes nt to the brilliance, conceptual rigor, ceaseless reinvention and creativity that defines Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic career. Utilizing the straightforward architecture of a simple, ranch-style home, the crisp white façade of Small House, delineated by rigid black lines and flat planes of red, yellow and turquoise convey Modernist geometric abstraction through Lichtenstein’s trademark Pop vernacular. Small House complicates fixed perspective through its deceivingly concave armature. In a unidirectional presentation, Small House mimics the compositional tendencies of low relief, while dramatically collapsing any visual depth or breach of surface.

Nowhere else does Lichtenstein so concisely articulate the iconicity of home as it relates to the semiotics of space, volume and void. The trompe l’oeil volumetric structure of Small House is highly phenomenological, presenting the viewer with a false front while exposing its own visual ruse through charged spatial engagement and inverted structure. In a unidirectional presentation, Small House mimics the compositional tendencies of low relief, while dramatically collapsing any visual depth or breach of surface. Small House is an exploration of visual trickery, exteriority and playful exchange with the viewer.

Small House features only the essential details of windows, door, roof, and shutters. The simplicity of the subject’s details is drawn not from a life study, but is instead mediated through the artist’s collects ion of printed source material, often lowbrow manuals for painting and items from everyday printed media. Lichtenstein begins his sculptural process on the page, with pencil sketches and color studies, then assessing his designs in a full-scale maquette before building the final work. Utilizing the straightforward architecture of a simple, ranch-style home, the subject complicates fixed perspective through its deceivingly concave armature. An important breakthrough during a late-career moment, Small House is perhaps Lichtenstein’s most concise exploration of illusionistic perspective. According to Hal Foster, Lichtenstein’s “schematic houses… exist in a no-man’s-land between painting and sculpture.” (Foster, 9) Where sculpture tends to convey information through three-dimensional form, Lichtenstein breaks with tradition by sticking to pictorial representation. Small House is strongly related to Lichtenstein’s other minimal house sculptures, which range in scale from monumental structures to small interior wall pieces. Held in prestigious collects ions like the National Gallery of Art, Lichtenstein’s house series is a unique example of an artist producing some of his most refined and exemplary work near the end of his life.

Though his legacy is most often evaluated for its contributions to the graphic arts, sculpture occupied a central position in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre from the first t.mes he cast one of his iconic blonde heroines in glazed ceramic in 1965 until his death in 1997. Indeed, the artist’s inclination toward boundary-blurring is nowhere more successful or more apparent than in his sculpted works, whose origins are inseparable from his paintings: here the two disciplines flow freely into and out of one another. In consideration of Lichtenstein’s sculptures, Hal Foster argues: “These pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture… Pop objects tend to be both-and. If most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here, and freezes it somewhere in between” (Hal Foster, 'Pop Pygmalion, in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, (and travelling), Roy Lichtenstein Sculpture, 2005, p. 10).

Contemporary Art

IN FOCUS: Roy Lichtenstein from The collects ion of Douglas S. Cramer