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

Roy Lichtenstein Offset Lithograph (*)
Reproduction of the work “Kiss V,” created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964.
Deluxe edition on coated graphic paper (250 g/m²)
Artwork 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 portfolio, and is offered in perfect condition).
- Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in a reinforced cardboard box. Shipping will be tracked and certified.

The shipment will also include transport 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 exploited the comic to turn it into museum material.
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the key figures of American pop art and, as such, drew inspiration for his work from both popular art—advertisements, magazines, comics—and the history of traditional art: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (in which he early on aligned himself)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by irony (something Pop artists boasted about, sometimes masked as snobbery or superficiality…), the use of Ben-Day dots (used in graphic arts) and industrial colors, the language of comics (onomatopoeia, panels, narration) and mastery of line.
Lichtenstein started in the fashionable Abstract Expressionism, but soon joined the rest of the pop guerrilla to rebel against abstraction and to use figuration. Moreover, the more popular and mechanical the figuration, the better.
Certainly, in 1958 there was nothing more popular and mechanical than a comic, so Lichtenstein decided he would create mass-produced commercial images.
That said… what appears to be a machine is hand-reproduced.
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 a masquerade.
Born in New York, Lichtenstein lived in this city, the capital of everything that Pop represents, and he died there at 73, celebrated as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.