1965 (SOLD)

Metaled polyester foil, aluminum and magna on board

21.5 x 26 inches (54.6 x 66 cm)

Signed and dated verso

Ex-collection:
The Artist
Leo Castelli
Larry Aldrich
Aldrich Museum of Art
Private collection until the present

Exhibitions:
The Larry Aldrich Museum Foundation, Old Hundred, Main Street, Ridgefield CT, November 1964 – December 1965
The Guggenheim Museum, Roy Lichtenstein, 1969, cat. 109 illus. p.92

Literature:
Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993, pages 126-148

About the Painting:
Pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein began his five-year landscape series in 1964. The subjects ranged form Art Deco-inspired landscapes of a sun projecting its rays, ancient Greek temples, columns, and Egyptin pyramids, to tripartite minimalist works of sea, land and sky, such as Littoral. The landscape, which formally derived from Lichtenstein’s earlier blow-up paintings of comic books, usually embodied his typical black outlines and his signatre painted Benday dots (a printing process in engraving where dots are used to shade or tint areas). In fact in Littoral, the artist’s masterful inclusion of a slender stip of Benday dots underneath a thin wavy black line serves as a seashore’s horizon line and division, and without it this work might not be recognizable as a landscape.
Lichtenstein’s incorporation of industrially-advanced material, as seen in Littoral, produced a new type of uniquely radical art. Depending on where one stands in front of Littoral, the image constantly changes in the reflection and shimmer of prismatic effect on the material. When the viewer moves the psychedelic patterns in the multi-lensed sea and sky areas seem to move, while simultaneously enveloping and stabilizing the immovable Benday dot seashore. The glimmering material also renders an idea of depth and volume, producing a quasi-holgraphic and remarkably 3 Dish sensation on what is, nonetheless, an emphatically flat surface.
Other Lichtenstein 1960s landscapees using industrial materials are: Electric Seascape #1 (Guggenheim Museum, New York); Yellow Sky (Ulmer Museum, Ulm, Germany); Cloud and Sea (Private Collection); Sussex (Robert and Jane Rosenblum, New York); and another work of the same title, Littoral (Private Collection, Japan).