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

Roy Liechtenstein offset lithography (*)
Reproduction of the work “Kiss V”, a piece created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1964.
Luxus edition on coated art paper (250 g/m²)
Print authorized by the Estate of Roy Liechtenstein.

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

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be insured with a tracking number.

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 stripped the comic of its context 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 traditional art history: Art Deco, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism (which he joined at the beginning of his career)…
Lichtenstein’s work is characterized by its irony (this is something pop artists boasted about, sometimes disguised as snobbishness or superficiality…), the use of benday dots (used in graphics arts) and industrial colors, the language of the comic (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 abstraction and to employ figuration. Moreover, the more popular and mechanical a figuration, the better.
Clearly there was nothing more popular and mechanical than a comic in 1958, so Lichtenstein decided to create mass-produced commercial images.
That said… what is reproduced by hand is what a machine seemed to have done.
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.
A New Yorker by birth, Lichtenstein lived (in) this city, the capital of all that pop represents, and he would die there at 73, having established himself as an artist who sold paintings for more than 40 million euros.