Roy Lichtenstein

This work is the last of a three-part sequence of paintings Lichtenstein completed in 1977, in which he makes a play on the pictorial idiom of Picasso and Dalí while re-interpreting motifs from his own oeuvre in a surrealistic style. For instance, he deforms facial features of the comic-strip beauties from his earlier works – such as the weeping blonde in the 1963 painting Hopeless (Kunstmuseum Basel), whose tears appear to have served as the model for this amorphous fragment of a face in Girl with tear III. Poised in delicate balance, yet ostensibly stable, the figure’s formal ambivalence gives it the appearance of a phantasm with contours that oscillate between the profile of a young girl and the face of a witch – a symbiosis of Lichtenstein’s token of reverence towards Surrealist art and of its perception by the viewing public.

Two years before he died, Roy Lichtenstein produced this enormous painting showing four naked beauties playing ball on the beach. Yet beyond its surface reading this impressive work reveals a number of other aspects, including certain references to earlier works of art. For instance, the bathing figures, the beach ball decorated with stars, the bathing hut and even the rocks towering up in the background are to be found in Picasso’s tiny Surrealist beach scenes from 1931 – to which Lichtenstein here has dedicated a large-scale monument. At the same time, Lichtenstein is also quoting from his own work, with the flowing manes of hair of the two women on the left and the right surely echoing his own “Brushstroke” works, in which he explored ways of portraying a brushstroke. The subtle interplay of dot screening and stripes removes the picture further from its ostensible superficiality and wholly transforms it into an ecstatic celebration of Western painting.