Roy LichtensteinSpray Can - 1 Cent Life. 1964.
- Ref: 649129/19691
£ 4,750.00
Original lithograph in blue ink. 1963-64. Drawn for the album 'One Cent Life' (see below). From the regular edition of 2000, all of which were issued unsigned as here. (There was a separate deluxe edition of 60, plus 40 proofs. Hand-drawn on zinc plates in New York; the edition printed at the Atelier Maurice Beaudet, Paris 1963. Album published by Kornfeld, Bern 1964.
Reference: Corlett – The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein no 34.
Superb fresh impression with brilliant colour. On pale cream wove paper, worked to the sheet size at the edges (the Ting poem at the foot of the sheet). Totally fresh unfaded condition. Image: 324 x 270mm. Sheet: 410 x 292mm.
This work was hand-drawn by Lichtenstein in his studio as the companion-piece for ‘Girl – 1Cent Life’ as Lichtenstein’s second contribution to the Chinese-American poet Walasse Tings’s ground-breaking album ‘1 Cent Life’. (The text of the poem for this Lichtenstein appears on the sheet below the image, as for all the prints, but is masked by the mount).
The use of the forms of such a mundane everyday object as a ’spray-can’ as a subject for ‘art’ underlines Lichtenstein’s central role in the changing concepts of the revolutionary ‘Pop Art’ generation in New York in the early years of the 1960s.
This and the comic-strip ‘Girl’ are amongst the very first prints in the ‘Pop Art’ period of Lichtenstein’s work. Simplicity of form and instant recognition were central to the Pop idea that visual immediacy appealed subconsciously to the viewer and brought art and the ‘everyday’ into a close new relationship.
