Nudes by Roy Lichtenstein

Nudes by Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes was created in 1993. Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes referenced 1960s comic book caricatures as opposed to living models to create his female forms. Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes hold to the strict color palette and two-dimensional pop style characteristic of Roy Lichtenstein, but also works to explore and expand the artist’s compositional technique; contrasting stark geometrical shapes and lines with the curvilinear form of the female body.

Lichtenstein began work on collages for the Nudes series in his New York studio during the spring of 1993.  In December of that year, he hand-cut the Rubylith stencils for the key (outline) relief plates for each image, and in February 1994 he made his first visit to the workshop for this project.

Most of the plates used to print the series were assembled using an aluminum or in some cases Lexan – a rigid, thick plastic – base plate on which were mounted the irregularly shaped photo-polymer plastic pieces that created the image areas.  The key (outline) plates, with one exception, were made of an irregularly shaped magnesium plate mounted onto a base plate.  (For one key plate, the irregularly shaped plate was made of plastic.)

About Roy Lichtenstein:

Roy Lichtenstein was a pop art painter whose works, in a style derived from comic strips, portray the trivialization of culture endemic in contemporary American life. Using bright, strident colors and techniques borrowed from the printing industry, he ironically incorporates mass-produced emotions and objects into highly sophisticated references to art history. He was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown, and he became a lightning rod for criticism of the movement.

Primary colors–red, yellow and blue, heavily outlined in black–became his favorites. Occasionally he used green. Instead of shades of color, he used the benday dot, a method by which an image is created, and its density of tone modulated in printing. Sometimes he selected a comic-strip scene, recomposed it, projected it onto his canvas and stenciled in the dots. “I want my painting to look as if it had been programmed,” Lichtenstein explained.

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