Forty works from the private collection of Roy Lichtenstein, one of the world’s best-known pop artists, will go on sale for the first time at auction next month.
The works, comprising paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, chart four decades of Lichtenstein’s career. They include his shift from abstract expressionism to pop art in the 1960s, his exploration of modern art in the 70s, his Reflections series of the 80s, and his interiors and nudes from the 90s.
The collection is expected to make more than $35m (£26m) when it is auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York next month. Several of the works come from Lichtenstein and his wife Dorothy’s home in Southampton, New York, where the artist created some of his most significant works.
Recent photos taken by Sotheby’s offer a rare look inside the light-filled studio that formed part of the residence, which was only accessible to the artist’s closest circle during his lifetime and was rarely photographed.
David Galperin, the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York, said the works “provide a front-row seat to Lichtenstein’s incomparable genius. Together, the group is a survey of the artist’s reflections of art history over four decades of practice.”
Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923 and took classes at the highly regarded Art Students League of New York in his teens. He was drafted into the US army in 1943 where he served as a draughtsman and artist. He later completed his fine arts degree at Ohio State University, where he also taught art.
In 1951, Lichtenstein held his first solo show in New York. He found fame in the early 1960s with his large-scale reworkings of comic-book illustrations, including a series of “girl paintings” depicting stereotypical “damsels in distress”. His range expanded to include sculpture and ceramics, and he became an icon of the pop art movement alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist.
Not everyone was a fan, however. An infamous 1964 Life magazine headline asked of Lichtenstein: “Is he the worst artist in the US?” Others criticised the lack of credit he gave to the comics artists who inspired him.
In 1968, Lichtenstein married Dorothy Herzka, a director of the Paul Bianchini Gallery in Manhattan. She became a philanthropist and, after her husband’s death, the president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. She died last year.
Speaking about his father’s work, Mitchell Lichtenstein said: “What I most appreciate is the sense of humour embedded in all of it. It’s a wry humour that was part of who he was every day.
“To my father, art was all about composition. When asked for comment about his subject matter, he often said: ‘It’s just marks on a page.’”
The works coming to auction include Reflections: Art (1988), part of a series that ironically looks back on the artist’s earlier works by making them look like stylised mirrors; Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (1996), a flat sculpture showing a woman’s profile; and a 1968 drawing of a smoking gun made for the cover of Time magazine, when the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy had sparked a fierce debate about gun control.
