Greene Street Mural

In December 1983, Roy Lichtenstein painted an eighteen-by-ninety-six-and-a-half-foot mural directly onto the walls of Leo Castelli's Greene Street gallery, a temporary work destroyed at the close of its six-week run. Gagosian's 2015 exhibition recreated it at full scale, introducing the piece to a generation that had only known it through photographs.

This book documents both versions, layering the mural's signature motifs, marbled composition-notebook patterns, cartoon brushstrokes, Swiss cheese, filing cabinets and folding chairs, across 180 pages. It includes an essay by the curator Camille Morineau, a conversation between Lichtenstein's former studio assistants Robert McKeever and Brian O'Leary and Gagosian's Alison McDonald, and photographs by Bob Adelman documenting the original mural's creation in 1983.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997) built his reputation on the comic-derived Pop paintings of the early 1960s, but continued experimenting with scale and site through the 1980s, of which the Greene Street Mural was among the most ambitious and most fleeting. The book situates the piece within a fuller account of his large-scale wall projects across his career.