?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ROY LICHTENSTEIN Brushstroke.
Color screenprint on heavy, white wove paper, 1965. 564x723 mm; 22 1/4x28 1/2 inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 280. Signed and inscribed "artist's proof" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Stephen Poleskie, Chiron Press, New York. Published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. A very good impression of this important, early Pop Art print, with strong colors. Corlett II.5.
Ex-collection Stephen Poleskie, Chiron Press, New York.
The deluxe, before letters, edition of an image also used as a poster and a mailer, both reproduced as color offset lithographs from this color screenprint, for Lichtenstein's (1923-1997) November 20-December 16, 1965, exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. This was the first exhibition of Lichtenstein's group of 15 iconic Brushstroke paintings. The current screenprint, Lichtenstein's first of many prints on the Brushstroke theme, is based on White Brushstroke I, oil on canvas, 1965 (sold Sotheby's, New York, June 29, 2020, lot 107). According to Waldman, 'Lichtenstein focused on brushwork as the signature of a style and used it . . . to address the issue of what characterizes style in art. Is it defined by an artist's brushstroke? Is it the result of the transmutation of one form into another? Or could it even be determined by an artist's signature on a common object? Or does it embrace all of these? In White Brushstroke I and other paintings of the period, Lichtenstein implies that painting can be reduced to a sign and that brushstrokes can be the means by which we recognize, not only a style--but content,' (Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993, pages 156-57.
Lichtenstein discussed the brushstroke form as follows: "The very nature of a brushstroke is anathema to outlining and filling in as used in cartoons. So I developed a form for it which is what I am trying to do in the explosions, airplanes, and people--that is, to get a standardized thing--a stamp or image. The brushstroke was particularly difficult. I got the idea very early because of the Mondrian and Picasso paintings which inevitably led to the idea of a de Kooning," (Corlett, The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein, A Catalogue Raisonné 1948-1993, Washington, D.C., 1993, pages 24-25).
This is the first screenprint on which Lichtenstein collaborated with Stephen Poleskie at Chiron Press, New York, and several additional printed projects with Poleskie followed in quick succession during the mid-to-late 1960s (see lots 212-219).
