Lichtenstein: seeing is believing: at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, a recent exhibition—replete with visually cunning paintings, works on paper and sculptures—examined Roy Lichtenstein's career-long preoccupation with spatial illusions and the science of perception

Art in America, July, 2002 by Roni Feinstein

Pop imagery makes an appearance in Head of a Girl (1964). In this work, Lichtenstein painted a commercial mannequin head with the same sort of graphic motifs he used in his paintings; the image here is closely related to his romance-comic works. The application of black lines and benday dots to the three-dimensional object resulted in a perceived flattening of the form, which he further explored in an edition of individually painted, cast ceramic heads modeled on this prototype.

With the exception of the ceramic Unfinished Stack of Dishes (1965), a still-life sculpture of volumetric forms distorted to accord with laws of painterly illusionism, all of Lichtenstein's subsequent freestanding sculptures compressed space into virtual flatness, with mass and volume only implied. In the patinated bronze sculpture Sleeping Muse (1983), for example, he renders the image of Brancusi's sculpture of the same name as a freestanding line drawing. Works of this type range from 3/4-inch to 1 1/2 inches in depth and occupy a single plane. The contours of the head circumscribe a void that takes on volume through familiar pictorial devices--hatched shading lines and the wavy striations of hair.

Female heads figure prominently in Lichtenstein's later sculpture. Though they hark back to the 1962 line drawing Crying Girl, later renditions of the image are drawn-in-space planar sculptures. All are frontally oriented works that expose conventions of (painterly) illusionism by carrying them off of the wall into real space. In Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (1996), for example, the black triangle of shadow seen below the woman's ear recalls the black wedge in the ink-on-paper drawing and serves the same function, to create the impression of contour. The bust-length sculpture is two-sided: on the "sun" side, the woman has blonde hair, and the sun's illumination of her form is represented by red dots, while on the "moon" side, both the hair and the dots are blue. The work is seductive in its subject, who is shown with closed eyes and parted lips, and in its form: the convincing roundness of the woman's bare shoulders and the way the hair "wraps around" the elongated neck lead us to walk around the sculpture and in that process discover the contrasts of the other side.

In the mid-1970s, Lichtenstein created a series of freestanding sculptures based on still-life themes. These works, made of painted and patinated bronze, again employ bold black outlines, primary colors and hatching. He also investigates illusionistic devices such as modeling, shading, foreshortening, perspective and so on. Perhaps the most successful of these is Goldfish Bowl (1977). Standing at a distance from the sculpture, we see a cylindrical container perched on a tall, square-topped, three-legged stool. Even after we walk up close, peer around the side and see that the piece is almost entirely planar, we step away and are fooled again. We repeat the procedure to study not only the spatial effects but the relationships of solid and void. Everywhere the hatching appears, the white stripes, which seem to be painted, are in fact cut out; space collapses, and we experience the integration of the work into the white wall some 4 feet behind it. Although the tripod base is rendered in three dimensions so that the sculpture can stand, even here the artist employs a trompe l'oeil spatial trick, distorting and compressing the legs' expected equilateral triangle.