Roy Lichtenstein: A Nude with a Happy Picture

Number 3: The third most expensive art work to be auctioned in 2020.

The painting is considered to be the most important work in the last great series of Lichtenstein nudes ever to be auctioned. There were 20 paintings in the series, and it was the last series of this pop art artist – Lichtenstein returned to comic book characters, which helped him gain popularity in the early 1960s. and which already appear solo in this series, without handsome men. The series refers to examples of female nudes by Titian, Matisse and Picasso, confronting the history of art, reinterpreted thanks to the aesthetics of raster comics.

Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 in New York. So he had to live in the golden times of this city. In his youth, he was fascinated by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and tried to play the saxophone himself. He studied painting in the 1940s. at Ohio State University. Initially, he painted in the style of abstract expressionism, that is, as it was necessary at that time to pursue a career.

The Pop-art breakthrough came in the early 1960s. when he started painting popular Disney cartoon characters. His first post-art painting, Look Mickey , was made in 1961.

Soon he was inspired by comics, commercials and motifs from other artists’ paintings. He started exhibiting his first comic pictures at the Castelli Gallery in New York, which promoted pop art artists. In 1965 represented the USA at the Venice Biennale and in the second half of the 1960s. he began to create Brushstrokes paintings parodying expressive abstractionism.

In 1994 designed giant murals for New York City’s 42nd Street Times Square Subway Station, installed in 2002. Just like Wojciech Fangor in Warsaw.