Untitled, 1967
Acrylic on canvas. 16 x 19 5/8 in. (41 x 50.5 cm). Signed and dated "Lichtenstein '67" on the reverse.

PROVENANCE Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Galleria Mareschalchi, Bologna

Lichtenstein has noted that the 1930s were "kind of blindly geometric." The geometric forms of the period and the naïveté of the style appealed to him: "I think they believed that simplicity was art. They believed very much in the rational and logical. To me there is something humorous in being that logical and rational about a work of art –using a diagonal that goes from one corner of the picture to another and using arcs that have their midpoint at the edge of the picture. All these are very logical things: dividing pictures into halves or thirds, or repeating images three times or five times. They used these formulas because they thought that if they did it would be art. Actually, it can be. There are two things here: the naïve quality of believing that logic would make art, and the possibility that it could." Lichtenstein constructed the compositions of these paintings out of a basic set of forms –circle, semicircle, rectangle, square and triangle- arranged in the manner of classic Art Deco design (in sets of threes of fours, for example). These subdivisions and repetitions activate each composition, creating a hub of energy contained only by the parameters of the canvas. Lines of speed or vectors appear to converge or diverge among the densely packed forms. The energy generated by these strategies is boosted by the tension between jagged or irregular silhouettes and self-contained geometric shapes. D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1993, p. 169