Roy Lichtenstein Composition Series For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein’s Composition series was created from 1995-96, a couple of years before the artist’s death, and is a fitting tribute to his lifelong passion for music. Whilst there are references to the visceral quality of music making and musical undertones amongst earlier series, such as Brushstrokes, this Composition series is the only one where he took a literal interpretation of the freeform spirit of music directly onto the canvas.

Lichtenstein’s mother was a gifted piano player and he was raised during New York’s infamous Jazz age of the 1930’s, a new improvisatory and liberal style of music making, which stayed with the artist throughout his life. He continued to visit the Apollo theatre and other concert halls into adolescence before taking up the saxophone just before his death (he already played the flute, clarinet, and piano). 

Composition series is his final exploration of the mass produced qualities of commercial printing which he assembled in this series into an essentially painterly composition.  In the four part series, Composition, Lichtenstein liberates musical notes and staves in a symphonic mixture of colour and form, so instinctive they almost spring from the surface as if dancing in reality. 

Lichtenstein once remarked, ‘You know, as you compose music, you are just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.’ 

It is perhaps fitting that in one of Lichtenstein’s most final series of artworks, he brought together some of his most compelling themes that run throughout all the artist’s oeuvre: the exploration of the visceral quality of creativity through mass commercial production and also the merging of high and low art culture through his pop art lens. The Composition series considers Lichtenstein’s most imperative questions all through the prism of his greatest passion; music and melody making.