Only the initial 19 produced in the original lifetime casting were distributed as awards between 1991-95 by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. There were two posthumous castings by other fabricators, including approximately 12 in 2002-06 and 100 in 2012, although as of this date, the foundation has no plans to distribute them.
Weisman Award (Yellow Brushstroke) is a sculpture from 1991 showing one of Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Brushstrokes. These celebrated works form an important part of the Pop Art canon, having first appeared in Lichtenstein’s paintings in the 1960s; they remained a key motif throughout the rest of his career. In the Brushstrokes, Lichtenstein analysed and satirised the focus on the artistic gesture that had grown during the Twentieth Century. Lichtenstein took the simple brushstroke, the product of a fleeting moment of action, and instead made a cartoon version of it, resulting in something that appeared mechanical.
Lichtenstein’s paintings featuring the Brushstroke motif attacked the idea in two dimensions; when he created them in three dimensions, he added an extra layer of meaning, as is the case in Weisman Award (Yellow Brushstroke). Here, the trails and spatter of a hastily-daubed brushstroke are captured through wavy bronze, while the vivid yellow of the paint itself is captured through the intense medium of enamel. As Lichtenstein himself explained, ‘My recent sculpture of a Brushstroke is an attempt to give strong form to something that is a momentary occurrence, to solidify something ephemeral, to make it concrete. The Brushstroke, the painter’s Brushstroke in bronze!’ (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in G. Mercurio, Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art, exh. cat., Milan, 2010, p. 221).
For Lichtenstein, one of the other appeals of working in three dimensions was the additional frame of reference his sculpture now invoked. Weisman Award (Yellow Brushstroke) has clear affinities with, say, the works of the American artist David Smith, whose sculptures had become legendary and were often linked to his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Smith’s Song of the Landscape, for instance, echoes the general composition of Weisman Award (Yellow Brushstroke), despite remaining largely abstract and evocative. Lichtenstein was aiming his satirical sights at the great guns of American post-war art when he created his Brushstrokes, lampooning and critiquing painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and also sculptors such as Smith, Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso. The deliberate flatness of Lichtenstein’s sculpture adds to his playful goading of these legends of the past—the sculptures of Smith, Gonzalez and Picasso all convey a sense of drawing in space. Lichtenstein, however, undermines the entire notion of the artwork functioning ‘in the round’, thereby deconstructing another medium.
The nineteen original examples of Weisman Award (Yellow Brushstroke) were created as an award by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. The Foundation supports the arts across a range of ventures while also exhibiting its own collection widely. Much of that collection is on display at the museum in Weisman’s Los Angeles home, where Lichtenstein’s own works can be seen alongside those of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, de Kooning, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol.