Illustration For De Denver Au Montana Depart Mai II
Illustration For De Denver Au Montana Depart Mai II
Signed Print
Roy Lichtenstein
48 x 35cm, Edition of 80, Intaglio, 1992
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Meaning & Analysis
Illustration For De Denver Au Montana Depart Mai II is a 1992 intaglio print by Roy Lichtenstein, published in a signed edition of 80. Against a deep red ground, a bright streak trails puffs of white smoke towards a burst of white and blue, surrounded by smaller explosions. The work belongs to The New Fall Of America suite.
Here Lichtenstein returns to the explosion, a motif he first drew from war comics in the early 1960s. A thin yellow and white trail arcs across the sheet, punctuated by clouds of smoke, before meeting a jagged white starburst with a cluster of red stripes at its centre. Smaller bursts in yellow, blue and white are scattered across the field, several of them filled with blue diagonal lines, and some are cropped by the edges of the plate so that the action appears to continue beyond the frame.
The etching and aquatint process gives the red background a grainy, mottled surface quite different from the flat colour of Lichtenstein's earlier screenprinted explosions. The print was one of ten illustrations made for La Nouvelle Chute de l'Amérique, the 1992 French edition of Allen Ginsberg's poems. Ginsberg's collection was written largely on the road during the Vietnam War years, and the imagery of flight paths and detonations sits alongside the poems' recurring concern with conflict. Lichtenstein keeps that subject at a graphic remove, rendering violence in the same clean outlines and patterns he used for a lamp or a brushstroke.
