Two Paintings: Craig…is the ultimate embodiment of Roy Lichtenstein's career-long exploration of his signature Pop idiom and pioneering investigation into the form, content, and meaning of Contemporary Art. An autobiographical encapsulation of his artistic oeuvre, the blonde in his trademark Ben-Day dot wistfully peers towards the framed Brushstroke paintings of his later career. An unparalleled and exquisite survey of Lichtenstein's ever-proliferating pictorial panorama of culture in 1960s America, Two Paintings: Craig… synthesizes the most important iconographical motifs of Lichtenstein's artistic lexicon. In reference to his 1964 painting Craig…, Lichtenstein chronicles his own contribution and redefining of Pop art. Her radiant blonde locks pouted red lips, and enigmatic expression encompasses the best of Lichtenstein's appropriated images, an unequivocal embodiment of female sexuality. Utterly breathtaking, Two Paintings: Craig… is the last of Lichtenstein's unabstracted archetypal blonde, a uniquely striking exemplar of this undisputed icon of Post-War American art.

The present work incomparably reflects on Lichtenstein's profound impact on twentieth-century art. Few masterworks, either by Lichtenstein or any of his contemporaries, subvert the heroic ideals of modern abstract painting as directly and successfully. The dream of being the blonde heroine from the present work, calling to her male savior, drove entire industries and billions of sales. Lichtenstein explained the appeal of comic books "[he] was very excited about, and interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images." (Roy Lichtenstein quoted in: John Coplan' An Interview with Roy Lichtenstein' October 1963) Informed by the irrational hope inspired by cinematic fantasy and comic book fiction, her character triggers an inexplicably emotional reaction. Lichtenstein's women explore society's ghoulish and perverse fascination with vulnerable, helpless heroines, war, and loss.

The present work's flattened and foreshortened perspectival space recall modes of consumer advertising while strengthening formal principles and pictorial conventions native to early Modernism. Lichtenstein's frames were quintessential of his Sixties paintings, a perfect amalgam of Pop sensibility and insightful engagement with prevailing art trends of the day. He looked to challenging the parameters of art itself, advertisements, and the visual culture contemporaneously unfolding around him. Bold, brilliant, and thrillingly irreverent, the brushstrokes reflect an exhilarating confrontation with the towering legacy of American Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein's motif of the imitation woodgrain is a way of playing on the concept of authenticity with which woodgrain is associated. The symbol is a kind of paradox: the stamp of an authentic Pop artwork that rejects, implicitly, the notion of authenticity. Lichtenstein instinctively understood the phenomenal potential of popular imagery, and more than any artist of his generation, realigned the cipher of that imagery to unveil verities behind popular culture. Complicating the contentious dichotomy between what constitutes "high" versus "low" culture, the present work illustrates the most influential motifs of Lichtenstein's investigation into mass-produced objects and reproduction of romantic comic books, exploring the distinction between the Replica Handbags and the commercial imagery that pervades our daily lives.

With half-lidded eyes and voluptuous lips, the protagonist calls "Craig..." This moment encapsulates the profound drama and sense of pregnant expectation that encapsulate Lichtenstein's most iconic works. Lichtenstein's painting is inherently and breathtakingly beautiful, both in its subject and its physical facture. It embodies the prevalent archetype of feminine beauty that had become the socio-cultural aspiration for millions since the Second World War. The viewer is granted visual access to the woman calling for ‘Craig’, however the male figure originally included in the source imagery is removed. Thus, the viewer becomes locked in a tantalizing interplay that teeters between attraction and the tension of irrevocable distance. With her open mouth and large, wistful eyes, she entrances the male she calls to with her beguiling temptation. Intriguing and mysterious, she demands our attention and seduces our gaze. She looks towards Lichtenstein’s representation of abstract Expressionism and painting itself and represents the consummate muse of both artist and viewer. As Diane Waldman notes:

In Two Paintings: Craig… Lichtenstein reflects on an amalgamation of his signature motifs, his striking blonde, still life's and referential brushstroke painting. In reflecting on his own impact on contemporary culture and reproducing his earlier appropriation of mass culture, Lichtenstein renders the ultimate embodiment of his artistic intentions. Having mastered the primary modus of industrial pictographic transmission, by almost covert.mes ans he enlisted this mass-media vocabulary to present alternate perspectives onto ideal realities. Through this methodology, he shone a brilliant light on the artifice of our image-saturated society, and yet, in the same moment, brought his paintings closer to a veritable authenticity in which the terms of their manufacture are laid entirely bare to the viewer. As his blonde looks towards an abstracted canvas, he confronts art history as his subject matter with striking finesse, systemically fracturing and reimagining iconic paintings of the Twentieth Century to compose his own. Strikingly beautiful, conceptually, and compositionally complex Two Paintings: Craig… is a decisive and profoundly important test.mes nt to Lichtenstein's contribution to Contemporary art.

Contemporary Art

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