La Sortie (State)
La Sortie (State)
Signed Print
Roy Lichtenstein
149 x 206cm, Edition of 10, Woodcut, 1994
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Meaning & Analysis
La Sortie (State) is a 1996 woodcut by Roy Lichtenstein, produced in a signed edition of 10. It depicts a domestic interior in shades of blue and grey: an armchair, a side table with a lamp and a striped wall behind, while a woman's leg in a polka-dot stocking disappears off the right edge of the composition. It is a state of La Sortie from the Interior series.
The title, French for "the exit", refers to the detail that gives the scene its narrative. The room is otherwise still and empty, its furniture outlined in heavy black and arranged as though for a catalogue photograph. Only the leg and high-heeled shoe at the far right suggest that someone has just left, turning an ordinary sitting room into a scene with a story half told. The catalogue raisonné lists pages from a Blondie comic among the source material, a reminder of how Lichtenstein continued to draw on comic imagery decades after his early Pop works.
The original La Sortie was made in 1990 as part of the Interior series, in which Lichtenstein enlarged the kind of room settings found in furniture advertising to the scale of a print almost two metres wide. That version was printed from two birch woodblocks in several colours. This state presents the composition in a restrained palette of cool blues and greys with a single touch of yellow on the side table, emphasising the graphic structure of black outline and diagonal hatching.
