Lot124 N11733 Roy Lichtenstein Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study)
"I think that he was portraying his idea of the dream girl."
Capturing the radiant beauty and defining Pop style of Roy Lichtenstein’s revolutionary oeuvre, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) embodies the investigation of materiality and image-making at the heart of the artist’s practice. Executed in 1995, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) harkens back to the comic-book heroines that catapulted Lichtenstein’s career in the mid-1960s, but is distinguished by a twist: here, Lichtenstein reimagines the inherently two-dimensional comic-book subject as a three-dimensional sculpture. Lichtenstein’s subject is the pinnacle of his acclaimed series of Nudes from the mid-1990s, which revisited the iconic female figures at the core of his early practice and, moreover, the Western art historical canon. Reflective and iterative, Lichtenstein’s practice is the result of reappropriations of his own oeuvre and the canon as well as exploration across media and form. Predating the celebrated bronze and wooden sculptures by the same title, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) constitutes a masterful evocation of the extraordinary and defining process that differentiates Lichtenstein’s revolutionary career. Enchanting and t.mes less, yet pioneering and triumphant, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) reveals a scintillating glimpse into the process that underpins Lichtenstein’s groundbreaking oeuvre.
"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."
Her face gently tipped upwards, eyelids softly closed and lips forming a subtle smile, Lichtenstein’s figure appears transfixed by the sky above. A stream of blue Ben-Day dots evokes the moon’s beams radiating against her skin. The progression of Lichtenstein’s signature pattern trickling down the base of the bust is punctuated only by a cherry red lip. Using color and line sparingly, Lichtenstein captures the full essence of the figure, offering a reappraisal of his own 1965 sculpture, Head with Blue Shadow, held in the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Sculpture collects ion in Dallas. In his earlier three-dimensional sculpture, the figure gazes forward, her face divided in two: one side adorned with red Ben-Day dots and the other blue. Three decades later, Lichtenstein revitalizes the same concept but employs bold black contour lines and negative space to suggest volume. Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) perfectly encapsulates Lichtenstein’s legendary status as an artist who investigated and recalibrated both art history and, eventually, his own practice in a relentless quest for discovery and innovation.
The smooth contours, bold outlines, and meticulous execution of Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) are the result of Lichtenstein’s assiduous collaged construction using tape, cut painted paper, marker, and graphite. Employing the most salient identifier of his iconography—the Ben-Day dot—in his iconic royal blue, Lichtenstein reformulates the caricatured female bombshell motif that commands his earliest comic-book paintings. Lichtenstein's sapphire celebration of the female form emerges from collaged elements, using cut planes of color to create an image of profound beauty. Much like Henri Matisse’s own innovations with medium, the present work recalls Matisse's languid azure composition, Blue Nude II. Lichtenstein’s collaged work reveals a rare view of the artist’s vision and intervention—the synthesis of mechanical perfection and handmade production that defines his oeuvre. Lichtenstein’s exploration across drawing, collage, painting, sculpture and printmaking brings the governing questions of originality and appropriation at the heart of his conceptual project to the fore. Through Lichtenstein’s initial collages, he contended with the compositional and theoretical challenges of his subject, utilizing his celebrated Pop vernacular and challenging the viewer’s expectations at every stage. In Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study), Lichtenstein borrows from the visual lexicon of mid-century romance comics, but plays with representing three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional form. Lichtenstein shatters multiple conventions in one image—contending with the arbitrary boundaries of both two- and three-dimensional representation in a singular collage.
Roy adored women. ... He may have even picked these women because he was so reserved in his own being that this was a way of latching on to the emotional highs and lows of life."
In the mid-1990s, shortly before Lichtenstein’s death in 1997, the artist returned to the female heroines of his 60s paintings, which were inspired by contemporaneous romance comics. The portrayal of feminine beauty across art history and popular media remains at the center of Lichtenstein’s practice across four decades, reaching a final peak with works such as Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study). Predating the acclaimed two-sided bronze and wooden sculptures by the same name, Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (Study) is the original manifestation of his conceptual program. Lichtenstein only executes a collage study of the cool blue, nightt.mes side, in which the figure tilts her head upward as if illuminated by the skies above. Lichtenstein would go on to create two unique wooden examples, one of which resides in the collects ion of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as a bronze edition of six, an example from which is held in the esteemed collects ion of The Broad, Los Angeles.
