Roy Lichtenstein 1970-1980

The 1970s are the decade of Lichtenstein most accounts skip past, and Jack Cowart's 1981 survey remains the book that argues them back into the centre of the work, tracking the move out of Pop sources and into Cubism, Surrealism and the studio itself.

Published by Hudson Hills Press with The Saint Louis Art Museum for the survey Cowart organised there, the catalogue covers paintings, sculpture and drawings made between 1970 and 1980: the Mirrors, the Entablatures, the Artist's Studios, the Cubist and Futurist paraphrases and the Surrealist canvases of the decade's end. Sixty-seven colour plates, five of them gatefolds, are set against a hundred black-and-white illustrations. Cowart describes these compositions as a rich dialogue of forms, all intuitively modified and released from their nominal sources, a formulation the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation still quotes.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997) had by then moved his main studio to Southampton on Long Island, and most of the work here was made there. German and Italian editions followed in 1982, and a limited issue was bound in red cloth with a slipcase and signed by artist and author.