Oil on canvas, 1953. 360x308 mm; 14x12 inches. Signed in oil, upper right recto, and titled and annotated in pencil, on the upper stretcher bar verso. With an early typed label on the frame back: "The Bug, Oil, R. F. Lichtenstein, Price:"
Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist, to Professor and Mrs. Roy H. Pearce, Columbus, OH, and La Jolla, CA; sold Rachel Davis Fine Arts, Cleveland, March 21, 2015, lot 187; private collection, Chicago.
Exhibited: "Out of Sight, from San Diego Collections," March 17-April 23, 1972, Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego.
Published: Busche, Roy Lichtenstein: Das Fruhwerk, 1942-60, Berlin, 1988, page 84, number 132.
Roy Pearce (1919-2012) was a professor of literature and one of the founders of the University of California, San Diego, Literature Department in 1963. Prior to moving to California, Pearce taught at Ohio State University, where he met and befriended Lichtenstein (1923-1997), who earned his bachelor's degree there in 1946 and a Master's in Fine Arts degree in 1949 (Lichtenstein also taught as an instructor in the fine arts dpeartment at Ohio State, a post he held intermitently during the 1950s). In 1951, Lichtenstein and his first wife, Isabel Wilson, moved to Cleveland and he also had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery, New York.
During his time in Cleveland, Lichtenstein pursued Native American-themed subjects in his paintings, drawings and prints. He was inspired by a book he had borrowed from Pearce on the art of the 19th century American painter George Caitlin (1796-1872), who specialized in Native American scenes and portraits. According to a New York Times interview in 2005, Lichtenstein referred to his 1950s paintings as, "Taking the kind of stodgy pictures you see in history textbooks and redoing them in a modern-art way." These early paintings, appropriated from 19th century models, anticipate Lichtenstein's comic strip-inspired subjects from the early 1960s onward, and which are seen as pioneering works in the American Pop Art canon.
