Paris Review Poster

Pop icon Roy Lichtenstein's renowned visual style owes its mechanised aesthetic to commercial printing strategies. The artist’s growing expertise in the field coincided with the technical renaissance of American printmaking. He experimented with methods as well as materials in skillfully achieving unprecedented tones and textures in his works.

Paris Review is an American literary quarterly founded in 1953, modeled on the independent literary magazines published in Paris in the 1920s. Lichtenstein’s Paris Review Poster of 1966 presents a schematised composition based on the streamlined visual heritage of Art Deco. Being the style of luxury and modernity, the print mimics the age in which the original Parisian versions of such magazines were initiated and produced.

The work uniquely employs Lichtenstein’s pioneering pop style of regularised patterns, thick black outlines, and saturated primary colours. The hard-edged, richly embellished canvas is enhanced by gleaming metal accents. As individually crafted as the contents of the Paris Review were meant to be, Lichtenstein’s intention was to recreate forms of sleek and anti-traditional elegance. Mirroring the knowledge and sophistication of the quarterly, the distinguishing features within this print are precise and geometrical. The artist’s later The New Fall Of America suite of 1992 was completed in collaboration with the literary magazine.