Lot137 N11733 Roy Lichtenstein Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers
“Picasso’s always been such a huge influence for me that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso… I don’t think that I’m over his influence.”
Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers epitomizes Roy Lichtenstein's legendary Pop idiom and intellectual prowess, expanding his ongoing dialogue with the art historical canon. As one of a discrete series of eleven Cubist Still Life paintings Lichtenstein completed between 1973-75, of which four are held in prominent museum collects ions, and the only to feature a vase of flowers, the present work is a rare and important example within the artist’s iconic oeuvre. Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers pays homage to the legacy of Pablo Picasso, the father of Cubism and one of Lichenstein’s greatest influences, by directly invoking and subverting Picasso’s Cubist Still Life Flowers from 1939-43. Here, Lichtenstein has further abstracted Picasso’s fragmented picture plane, distilling the flowers and translucent vase to geometric planes of canary yellow, emerald green and soft peach. Further test.mes nt to the caliber of this painting, Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers has been widely exhibited at major international exhibitions, including his 1981 mid-career retrospective which included a leg at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Breuer building on Madison Avenue.
Responding to one of the most iconic and enduring subjects in all of art history, the still life, Lichtenstein dismantles and refines his image in an investigation that is at once cerebral, satirical and utterly beautiful. Lichtenstein renders the translucent vase with a series of geometric shapes. His flowers are jagged geometric planes of yellow and white; his leaves are sharp triangles; his stems float above the vase, detached from their blossoms. Recalibrating Picasso’s 1939-43 work, Lichtenstein alters and augments his predecessor’s composition, omitting all but the vase from his composition. Lichtenstein’s fifth flower, an addition to the four featured in Picasso’s painting, rests outside of the vase—possibly fallen, removed or yet to be incorporated into the arrangement. This sole flower conveys a colossal presence: a symbol of ephemeral beauty, a gesture of affection, and here a signifier of the inherent artificiality of the composition. The fifth flower floats behind the translucent vase, but the viewer cannot see its stem through the glass. Lichtenstein has deconstructed the picture plane with bold geometric lines and flat planes of color, reimagining a very tangible subject into figments of a graphic, comic world. Behind the solitary vase, Lichtenstein has fractured the background, dividing the space into hash lines, fading Ben-Day dots, and even abstracted versions of his own Entablatures. In the present work, Lichtenstein’s play with Analytical Cubism is on full display, as the artist synthesizes multiple perspectival planes in a singular composition. The present work is a quintessential evocation of Lichtenstein’s fascination with art historical subjects which have become ubiquitous in popular imagery, such as the domestic still life.
For Lichtenstein, the 1970s marked a transition from the comic-book-inspired Pop paintings the defined his work of the 1960s to a witty interrogation of the art historical canon—from Classical architecture to Futurism, German Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism and Art Deco. A pivotal year amid his explorations of the decade, 1973 marked Lichtenstein’s concerted inquiry into perhaps the most revolutionary movement of the Twentieth Century: Cubism. Even before this year, though, Picasso’s influence is evident in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre: Lichtenstein’s first overt response to Picasso appears in 1962 with the seminal painting Femme au chapeau. Lichtenstein’s interplay between form and fragmentation transforms the space in which the flowers and vase reside. Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers is an exceptional eulogy to the work of Picasso, with its subject matter recalling Picasso’s Cubist Still Life Flowers, and its rendition a manifestation of Lichtenstein's refashioning of Cubist theory. Lichtenstein employs bold contour lines and flat geometric planes of color to both define and flatten space. Lichtenstein thereby takes Picasso’s Analytical Cubism a step further, using an economy of line and color to simultaneously evoke his processor and invent a wholly new style. As Lichtenstein reflected in 1995: “What I am painting is a kind of Picasso done the way a cartoonist does it, or the way it might be described to you, so it loses the subtleties of Picasso, but it takes on other characteristics: the Picasso is converted to my pseudo-cartoon style and takes on a character of its own.” (the artist quoted in: Graham Bader, ed., Roy Lichtenstein: October Files 7, Cambridge 2009, p. 61).
Not only a direct referent to Picasso, Lichtenstein’s work also harkens back to the history of still life painting. First gaining prominence in the Seventeenth Century as Vanitas paintings, the genre of still lives have become an essential part of a collects or’s corpus. Conveyors of material identity, traditional still life paintings often reflected the wealth, status, and stylistic tastes of their owner. In European still life paintings, flower arrangements evoked a sense of aesthetic intuition and demonstrated a metric of class and decorative appeal. In turn, Cubism illustrates these objects against walls, deceptive patterns, and decorative interiors to collapse the distance between the painting and the two-dimensional surface. In a world of commodities, commercial advertising, and mass consumption, Lichtenstein reinterprets these historical subjects within popular culture.
“What I am painting is a kind of Picasso done the way a cartoonist does it, or the way it might be described to you, so it loses the subtleties of Picasso, but it takes on other characteristics: the Picasso is converted to my pseudo-cartoon style and takes on a character of its own.”
Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers is a masterful exemplar of Lichtenstein’s unparalleled ability to synthesize the art historical canon with the visual lexicon of Pop. Monumental in scale, replete with canonical referents—from the subject of the still life to Picasso’s Analytical Cubism—Cubist Still Life with Vase and Flowers is a pure embodiment of Lichtenstein’s distinctive Pop vernacular and ability to reflect on and reinvent the icons of art history.
