114 / 254
150 ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Indian
.
Oil on canvas, 1951. 508x410 mm; 20x16
1
/
8
inches. Signed and dated in
oil, lower left recto. Ex-collection Professor and Mrs. Roy H. Pearce,
Columbus, OH and La Jolla, CA, acquired directly from the artist.
Exhibited, “San Diego Collects,” La Jolla Museum of Contemporary
Art, La Jolla, 1975.
Published in Busche,
Roy Lichtenstein: Das Fruhwerk, 1942-60
, Berlin,
1988, page 126, number 63.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue
raisonné
in
preparation by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, New York, and is
archived on the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation website.
Roy Pearce (1919-2012) was a professor of literature and one of the founders
of the University of California, San Diego, Literature Department in
1963. Prior to moving to California, Pearce taught at Ohio State
University, where he met and befriended Lichtenstein, who earned his
bachelor’s degree there in 1946 and a master’s in fine arts degree in 1949
(Lichtenstein also taught as an instructor in the fine arts department at
Ohio State, a post he held intermittently during the 1950s). In 1951,
Lichtenstein and his first wife, Isabel Wilson, moved to Cleveland and
he had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery, NewYork.
During his time in Cleveland, Lichtenstein pursued Native American-
themed subjects in his paintings, drawings and prints. He was inspired
by a book he had borrowed from Pearce on the art of the 19th century
American painter George Caitlin, who specialized in Native American
scenes and portraits. According to a
NewYork Times
interview in 2005,
Lichtenstein referred to his 1950s paintings as, “Taking the kind of
stodgy pictures you see in history textbooks and redoing them in a
modern-art way.”These early paintings, appropriated from 19th century
models, are important thematic and stylistic precursors to Lichtenstein’s
comic strip-inspired subjects from the early 1960s onward, which are
seminal works in the American Pop Art canon.
[60,000/90,000]