“Everything I do is a comment on something. It’s ironic or humorous. When I do a still life, it’s a comment on the act of doing a still life... It’s meant to make the spectator wonder about it.”
—Roy LichtensteinCreated towards the end of his career, Roy Lichtenstein’s Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior of 1992 is a vision of quotidian domesticity rendered in the artist’s signature syntax of bold primary colours, heavy black outlining and Ben-Day dots. Over two and a half metres long, the monumental work invites the viewer into a fully furnished modern living room. The tightly constructed composition is elongated by the use of a mirror, reflecting the rest of the room back into the picture plane. The formal elements are structured around the two diagonal lines running along the sofa and the lower edge of the mirror. Following the rules of linear perspective, they create the illusion of depth among the composition’s flat forms. Nonetheless, Lichtenstein does not attempt to convey anything other than a two-dimensional simulation, using blocks of colour and graphic patterns of dots, lines and swirls to insistently remind the viewer of the two-dimensional nature of the scene.

Mid-Century motel postcards from The Continental Inn, Lexington, Kentucky (left) and the Stadium Motor Lodge, 65 Deluxe Fireproof Rooms, New York (right).

Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior is the last in Lichtenstein’s Interiors series of the early 1990s, which presents modern, impersonal interior scenes reminiscent of motel rooms – anonymous and unlived in. The series was inspired by a billboard advertisement that Lichtenstein saw in Rome in 1989. Upon returning to New York, he began to experiment with similar motifs that he found in Yellow Pages catalogues. Alike the endless advertisements in the Yellow Pages, the style and furniture of Lichtenstein’s pictorial compositions are also varied throughout the series; something for everyone, as our consumer society mandates. The ease of access and choice of pick recalls the notion of the Yellow Pages slogan: “Let your fingers do the walking”, which Lichtenstein quite literally adopts. Appropriating advertisement clippings in the comic-strip spirit of Pop, Lichtenstein creates new composite forms served up as large-scale dreams, bringing to life the idyllic domestic fantasy sold in the Yellow Pages.

In the Interiors series, Lichtenstein enlivens the simple, graphic room with whimsical touches of realism, such as the picture hanging on the wall in the present lot, which stands out in the composition for showing some illusion of naturalism, owing to the shading in the leaves. Similarly, Lichtenstein’s early works and other iconic images by his Pop Art contemporaries – Andy Warhol’s Mao, for example – appear hanging on the walls of scenes from the Interiors series. Although the domestic compositions are devoid of human presence, by referencing art by both the artist and his peers, Lichtenstein connected the works to contemporary reality – almost a “hint to the real world” – as opposed to an aloof abstract simulation comprised of dots and lines.

Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior is a masterful example of Lichtenstein breaking the barriers of art and everyday life. Utilising the catchy iconography of advertisements that alluded to middle-class consumer culture, Lichtenstein neither pays homage to nor denigrates contemporary culture. Instead, Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior and the other works of the Interiors series act to rebrand banal, familiar imagery with the potent artistic locution that Lichtenstein is so renowned for.
- Literature
  Gemini G.E.L. 1558
  Mary Lee Corlett 260

119

Roy Lichtenstein

Wallpaper With Blue Floor Interior (G. 1558, C. 260)

1992
Screenprint in colours, on five sheets of Paper Technologies Inc. Waterleaf paper, the full sheets.
each S. approx. 259.1 x 77.3 cm (102 x 30 3/8 in.)
overall 259.1 x 386 cm (102 x 151 7/8 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 181/300 in silver ink on the fourth panel, published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles (with their and the artist's blindstamps), unframed.

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