Roy Lichtenstein - Kiss V - offset lithograph - licensed print 2004

Roy Lichtenstein offset lithography (*) Reproduction of the work “Kiss V,” created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964. Luxury edition on glossy graphic paper (250 g/m²). Print authorized by the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

- Sheet dimensions: 28 x 36 cm
- Image dimensions: 20 x 20 cm
- Year: 2004
- Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, always kept in a professional art folder, so it is offered in perfect condition).
- Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. Shipping will be registered with a tracking number.

The shipment will also include transportation insurance for the final value of the work with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) The painter and sculptor who ripped the comic to turn it into museum material. Roy Lichtenstein was one of the key figures of American pop, and as such drew inspiration for his work from popular art: advertisements, magazines, comics…; as well as from the history of traditional art: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (which he embraced early in his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (something pop artists boasted about, sometimes cloaked in snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Benday dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of comics (onomatopoeia, panels, narrative) and mastery of line.
Lichtenstein began in the fashionable Abstract Expressionism, but soon joined the rest of the pop guerrilla to rebel against the abstract and to use figuration. Furthermore, figurative art as popular and mechanical as possible.
Of course there was nothing more popular and mechanical than a comic in 1958, so Lichtenstein decided he would create mass-produced commercial images.
That said… he reproduced by hand what appears to have been done by a machine.
Those images were faithful portraits of consumer society and mass culture, which may or may not be a critique of the contemporary world, an idealization or a satire of Western capitalist society.
That ambiguity between critique and admiration, between mockery and respect, is typical of pop art, which cynically plays at masquerade.
A New Yorker by birth, Lichtenstein lived in this city, the capital of everything that pop represents, and in it he would die at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.