White Brushstroke I is one of the most striking examples of Lichtenstein's iconic Brushstroke series of paintings, comprising 15 canvases executed in 1965-66 that are considered pivotal masterpieces of the Pop Art movement.
The 1965 painting that will go to Sotheby's auction of contemporary art in New York, with an estimate of $ 20/30 million it is one of the few brushstroke canvases remaining in private hands, with eight examples already held or promised in museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York , among others.
White Brushstroke I was first exhibited in the historic debut of the Brushstrokes series at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November-December 1965. The painting has also been shown in numerous museum exhibitions relating to Lichtenstein's career including: the first survey of the artist at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1969; Roy Lichtenstein, the great traveling retrospective organized by the Guggenheim from 1993 to 1994; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and several other prominent institutions.
Sotheby's Evening and Daytime Auctions of Contemporary, Impressionist and Modern Art, previously scheduled for May, will take place in New York City the week of June 29, pending the lifting of certain restrictions and confirmation from the relevant authorities that we can proceed.
Lichtenstein's inspiration for the Brushstroke series came from a motif from a comic story called The Painting, printed in Strange Suspense Stories in October 1964, in which a tortured artist battles a painting that appears to take on a life of its own . Reductive in its simplicity, the work demonstrates the singular significance of Brushstrokes' paintings within his oeuvre and represents the definitive embodiment of Lichtenstein's pioneering investigation into the form, content and meaning of contemporary art.
Bold, brilliant, and irreverent, White Brushstroke I and the other brushstroke paintings mark a pivotal moment in Lichtenstein's long career about art for art's sake. Here, for the first time, Lichtenstein turns his questioning gaze to the very act of painting.
Replacing the popular and commercial imagery that inspired his earlier paintings, Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes offers tongue-in-cheek commentary on the explosive strokes and splashes of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, whose action painting had dominated critical discourse of the previous decade.
