Brushstroke on Canvas
Roy Lichtenstein American
Printer Tyler Graphics, Ltd. American
Publisher Mezzanine Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Not on view
In the mid-1960s, Roy Lichtenstein abandoned the comic-book motifs for which he was initially celebrated. However, he continued to employ a graphic formal vocabulary inspired by the popular-culture source, comprising Ben-Day dots, diagonal slashes, black outlines, and a bold palette of pure, unmodulated color. In Brushstroke, Lichtenstein used this Pop aesthetic to depict a form that evokes both the generic act of painting and the dramatic gestural marks of "action painters" and Informel artists. The schematic lines in his "brushstroke" works functioned on a semiotic level in that they were designed to be read as "brushstrokes" yet were not actually the broad, fluid marks to which they refer.
