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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) HEAD WITH MONOCLE signed and dated "Lichtenstein 80" on the reverse ...

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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) HEAD WITH MONOCLE signed and dated Lichtenstein 80 on the reverse ...
ROY LICHTENSTEIN
(1923-1997)
HEAD WITH MONOCLE
signed and dated
"Lichtenstein 80" on the reverse
oil and magna on canvas
36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm)
painted in 1980 <p>PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the artist
James Goodman Gallery, NEW YORK <p>EXHIBITED
The Saint Louis Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; NEW YORK,
The Whitney Museum of American Art; Fort Worth Art Museum,
ROY LICHTENSTEIN: 1970-1980, May 8, 1981-February 7, 1982, p. 136 (illustrated)
Near the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, Lichtenstein fused the pictorial principles of modernism, specifically of Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and German Expressionism, into his own unique style. Ultimately, art itself became Lichtenstein's subject, as the artist shifted from commercial art to high art for his source material.
During these years, German Expressionism's intersecting planes and angular dynamic lines - of woodcuts and paintings, most specifically - appealed to Lichtenstein's sense of the graphic, which is evident in HEAD WITH MONOCLE, 1980. Lichtenstein's focus on German Expressionism initiated a move towards painting the human head, a subject matter which he had strayed from portraying as his interest focused on the abstraction of objects from the mid-1960s until the end of the 1970s. In these paintings, Lichtenstein increased his use of striping and grain as reference to German Expressionistic woodcut backgrounds, in lieu of his signature benday dots. Moreover, in these paintings, as in HEAD WITH MONOCLE, he brings the viewer into a tight, close-up view, with a tough, less whimsical image. In HEAD WITH MONOCLE, the hard angularity, variety of striping, and the dark palette with strong contrasts of reds, blacks, yellows, and blues bring to mind the works of such artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann. Lichtenstein's painting, however, most specifically seems a reference to the iconic German Expressionist paintings, PORTRAIT OF RAOUL HAUSMANN, 1920, by Conrad Felixmüller and PORTRAIT OF JOURNALIST SYLVIA VON HARDEN, 1926, by Otto Dix. Lichtenstein translates the harsh, pointed facial features of both Raoul Hausmann and Sylvia von Harden, each with a monocle, through hard-edged and angular intersecting planes of contrasting primary colors. Moreover, in HEAD WITH MONOCLE, Lichtenstein injects and accentuates a harsh angular dynamic by the extreme close-up of the figure's face.
Diane Waldman has noted, "German Expressionism gave twentieth century art a new artistic language, imparting an intense psychological expression to painting through the use of distorted forms, jagged lines, and violent colors. Aware of their great historical antecedents, German Expressionists reinvigorated such timeless subjects as landscape and the figure with new meaning, reinterpreted color as it is applied to form, and reinvented the woodcut...it is German Expressionism that connects most directly with Lichtenstein's interest in issues of painting and style. German Expressionist pictorial innovations led him to expand his ideas into sculpture and into a series of landscapes and figurative paintings that are arguably his answer to Abstract Expressionism, which was indebted in no small way to the pioneering movement in early twentieth-century Germany" (D. Waldman, ROY LICHTENSTEIN, NEW YORK, 1993, pp. 21-253).
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