Roy Lichtenstein's 3-D Sculpture - Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1999

Although best known as a painter, American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein also devoted his artistic career to creating sculptural, three-dimensional objects. An exhibition of the artist's sculpture and related drawings, models, and sketchbooks includes 100 sculptures and three-dimensional maquettes or models, the earliest of which are figural carvings and assemblages dating from the mid 1940s and 1950s. The latest is his last personally finished sculpture--the monumental "House II," previously seen only at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

Various other large sculptures range from a 32-foot-high "Brushstroke Group" of 1988 to the actual 1977 BMW 320i rally car--the artist-decorated "Lichtenstein Art Car"--which competed in the 1977 Le Mans 24-hour race, to the 12-foot-high "Brushstroke Nude" (1993), a towering, colorfully painted, cast aluminum piece.

As one of the pioneers of so-called Pop Art in the 1960s, Lichtenstein shocked the art world with the new visual language of his paintings and sculptures. Merging popular imagery with traditional fine art and borrowing the techniques of advertising as well as comics, he established an original style. In exploring sculptural forms, he often translated motifs from his paintings--as varied as mirror reflections, steam rising from a coffee cup, light streaming from a lamp, or the broad sweep of a brushstroke--for his subjects. He used in these sculptures his signature dots, diagonal stripes, and bold primary colors in an effort to call into question accepted notions about the perception of three-dimensional objects. Many of these forms he evolved into large, low-relief, cast-painted and patinated, see-through bronzes.

The exhibition, "Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture and Drawings," is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through Sept. 30.