Mural with Blue Brushstroke

In 1986 Roy Lichtenstein finished a five-storey painting on the lobby wall of the Equitable Center in Midtown Manhattan, and this book is the record of how it got there, from first maquette to the last taped outline.

Calvin Tomkins's essay sets Mural with Blue Brushstroke against the long life of the Brushstroke motif in Lichtenstein's work, while Bob Adelman's photographs and interview follow the commission through the studio and onto the site: the design drawings begun in autumn 1984, the projection of the maquette onto plaster, and the six weeks of execution completed by assistants in January 1986. Pari Stave writes on the collaboration between artist and patron. Abrams produced the volume as a square nine-inch book carrying some 142 illustrations, 130 of them in colour, so that details of the finished wall can be read against the process shots.

The mural folds a compressed history of twentieth-century art into cartoon shorthand, quoting Léger, Matisse and Lichtenstein's own earlier paintings alongside a blast symbol, a sponge and a wedge of Swiss cheese. Lichtenstein (1923-1997) had been working at architectural scale since the late 1970s, and at roughly 20 by 10 metres this remained the largest painting he made.