"Today, finally, even the hegemony of “culture” is dissolving... and we’re back to the issue of what’s good and what’s bad, regardless. This leaves paintings like Lichtenstein’s Modern Paintings alive in the eternal present as singular confrontational objects...They don’t give themselves up or let you go.”
An electrifying composition of saturated colors and searing forms, Modern Painting with Small Bolt is the ultimate embodiment of Roy Lichtenstein’s pioneering investigation into the form, content, and meaning of Contemporary Art. A test.mes nt to Roy Lichtenstein’s mastery of composition and space, Modern Painting with Small Bolt of 1967 is an iconic exemplar from the artist’s pivotal series of Modern Paintings, in which Lichtenstein breaks free of his signature Pop Art graphics to interrogate the very foundations of art historical precedents. Exemplifying Lichtenstein’s career-long investigation of art history, the present work takes as its inspiration the sleek and stylized forms of the Art Deco movement of the 1920s and 30s, reimagined and reorganized into a complex network of industrial images. Here, the familiar ornamentation and decorative motifs of that era are made new, deftly rearticulated in the sleek commercial style of Lichtenstein’s signature Pop idiom. A kaleidoscopic vision of overlapping shapes and symbols, the present work further demonstrates Lichtenstein’s fascination with the work of de Stijl artists such as Theo van Doesberg and Piet Mondrian, whose inspiration is legible in the industrial ligatures and chromatic dissonance of the present work. Testifying to the significance of this series, examples of Lichtenstein’s Modern Paintings are held in esteemed institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Paintings Held in International Museum collects ions
Within Modern Painting with Small Bolt, an iconic industrial skyline emerges, composed with fractured symmetry and a signature graphic aesthetic. A master of symbolic parody, Lichtenstein pulls visual motifs seamlessly into the complex composition: a tiered structure rises along the left-hand side of the picture plane, while two beams of light cut diagonally across the composition, these individual compositional components deftly bound tightly together into an aggregate geometric puzzle. Initially inspired by his commissioned design for the 1967 Lincoln Center poster, which also includes a similarly composed towering structure and soaring beams of light, the present work plays on iconic motifs from the Art Deco movement. While exceptionally unified and balanced, Modern Painting with Small Bolt is full of stylistic contradictions: a current of vibrant yellow cuts a jagged line through the foreground with a sharp angularity, while a cloud of billowing white smoke rises along the upper right-hand side of the picture plane; industrial forms slice through the fractured blue sky while curving rings and semicircles pulse against the linearity of the picture. These contradictions serve to further parody these highly popular, industrial motifs typical of Art Deco design, and deepen the conceptual nuance of this iconic work.
Just as Picasso began to interrogate Diego Velázquez and his Spanish exemplars at a critical moment in his mature career, so did Lichtenstein begin to articulate and redefine the basis of art history, making a shift away from his earlier focus on the iconography of comics and advertising towards a deeper interrogation of art historical precedents. His Modern Series of 1967-68, initially inspired by his design the of the 1967 Lincoln Center poster in which he utilized the architecture of the theater itself to inform the stylistic and compositional choices for the design, marks a pivotal development in Lichtenstein’s derivative practice. Following this commissioned work, Lichtenstein continued to explore these themes, creating paintings and sculptures with hyperbolic interpretations of already highly aestheticized works by stylizing them further. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Modern Painting with Small Bolt, in which Lichtenstein draws attention to the decorative excesses of Art Deco by pairing it against the simplicity and chromatic purity of the de Stijl movement.
The present work builds upon the artistic and compositional elements of renowned modernists and de Stijl artists such as Theo van Doesberg and Piet Mondrian, whose work testifies to highly aestheticized forms of abstraction. Lichtenstein grappled at length with Mondrian’s work and the utopian notions of structure and order that were represented both in Mondrian’s paintings and the political sent.mes nts of the period of their creation. In an interview with Diane Waldman, former deputy director and senior curator of the Guggenheim Museum, Lichtenstein considers the nuances of Mondrian’s work: “I think his work looks superficially rigid. But it couldn’t have been done without an inner flexibility” (Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York 1971, p. 27). The present work embodies Lichtenstein’s examination of turbulence beneath the surface of the visual register of the two-dimensional canvas, and its investigation into the nuances of modernists like Mondrian places it at the crux of Lichtenstein’s artistic pathos.
“What 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."
According to critic David Antin, Lichtenstein’s pivotal Modern Painting series manifests the driving concern at the heart of his practice: by parodying the vernacular of Modernism, Lichtenstein reduces it to a bygone era and triumphantly inaugurates a new aesthetic course of art history – one that is decisively contemporary. He writes: “The pathos of Modern Art is particular to itself…. 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” (David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” Boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 1972, p.99). In this way, the present work not only portrays a richly stylized take on the modernist era, but also testifies to Lichtenstein’s influence over the aesthetic progression of major artistic movements.
In its investigation of Art Deco and Modern principles, Modern Painting with Small Bolt stands at the very heart of Roy Lichtenstein’s extraordinary artistic legacy. Deeply entrenched in art historical precedents, Modern Painting with Small Bolt presents the viewer with the ultimate encapsulation of Lichtenstein’s most compelling subject matter: art that questions the nature of art itself.
