light and stone

Estate of Roy Lichtenstein,
 “Indian” (1951), at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

I don't remember ever seeing Roy Lichtenstein's pre-Pop work before. This is rather beautiful. 

If you click and enlarge it, the sense of the eye being teased into dimensionality beyond the plane is very strong. This prefigures the comic book art work, in which the eye is practically dared to see a broken series of regular Ben-day dots as an object, a familiarity cut up and cut out in circles.

This image is taken from Roberta Smith's New York Times article on three Lichtenstein shows now viewable. If you check out the slide show, you'll see a late sketch clearly in homage to Matisse, as are the leaf-like structures and the triangle of red visible in this painting completed forty years earlier.

The title, Indian, probably has something to do with the stitch-like dashes in the upper right and the suggestion of unfolding at the left center - I think of tee-pees. And the two vertical dots - two "eyes" - in the stitched area make me think of Philip Guston's klansmen, masked but unveiled in the '70s.