Two Paintings

In Two Paintings, Lichtenstein turns the act of picture-making into his subject. The upper canvas is cropped by the edge of the sheet and broken into irregular cells of colour and diagonal stripes, its heavy black outlines recalling leaded glass. Beneath a silver ledge, the lower canvas sits in a scrolling frame drawn with a few curling white highlights. Inside it, a face covered in red Benday dots stares out with eyes placed on different planes, topped by a green spiral and a cluster of spiky star shapes, a knowing nod to the vocabulary of Picasso and Miró.

The Paintings series extended a line of enquiry Lichtenstein had pursued since his Artist's Studio works of the 1970s, where he quoted his own pictures and those of the modernists he admired. Here the brushwork, frames and stylistic quirks of earlier art are translated into the flat, mechanical language of commercial printing. The woodcut grain visible in the black passages adds a tactile quality to that language, and some catalogues record lithography, screenprinting and collage alongside the woodcut, underlining how freely Lichtenstein moved between techniques at this stage of his career.