“Everything I'm doing now had its origin at the beginning of my career…Everything I do is a comment on something. It's ironic or humorous… It's meant to make the spectator wonder about it”
—Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein's Nudes was the final major series the artist produced before his death in 1997. The nine prints consider the traditional art historical genre of the female nude through the lens of Pop Art and mark Lichtenstein's return to his iconic 1960s comic book style, consisting of Benday dot patterns, bright colors, and bold lines. Published and printed by Tyler Graphics Ltd. in Mount Kisco, New York, Lichtenstein referenced his existing print oeuvre, integrating motifs found in earlier works from the Reflections, Imperfect, Water Lily, and Interiors series. After four decades of prompting radical and fundamental questions of art and artmaking, he was apt to select the female figure as his subject matter and revisit the work of his early career.
Amidst a dynamic arrangement of dots and geometric abstractions, Nude with Yellow Pillow presents a cherry-lipped, blonde heroine gazing into the viewer's eyes, her hair effortlessly flowing in the breeze. A provocative stereotype, Lichtenstein presents the nude form as a commodity of desire, amidst a society obsessed with external presentation and domestic perfection. Taken from comic books, Lichtenstein re-worked the found material, confronting the latent desire present in quotidian commercial products and sardonically acknowledging the male gaze embedded within the canon of art history.
Here, the domestic arena is subsumed by Lichtenstein's graphic patterning and signature pictorial language. A complex compositional arrangement, this late work reflects the artist's mastery of navigating texture, color, and form. The densely layered interior, inspired by home décor and furniture advertisements in the yellow pages, provides a rich contrast of rigid geometry against the undulating and volumetric form of the body. Engaging with the nude as subject, Lichtenstein boldly inserts himself into a longstanding artistic lineage, newly interpreting this traditional painterly genre. Subverting the classical theme through a pop facade, this work presents quintessential elements of Lichtenstein's oeuvre, and simultaneously presents a poignant commentary on the consumer culture of everyday America.