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opportunity to view this evolutionary, creative process. At the Fundación and in
this catalogue one does see the selective, editorial artist at difficult work,
effecting his trademark transformation of a known or given form- or even a form
he has thought up “freehand”- into something uniquely his own while
pushing at the boundaries or capabilities of art media.
I think Lichtenstein’s personal sourcebooks, clippings, sketchbooks and many,
many extant drawings and collages offer some of the best clues to his thoughts
and process, his hand, touch and eye. In these works he is planning and
scheming, musing on composition and source, usually on a small sketchbook
sheet. Almost every drawing has some other practical purpose: a painting, a
print, a sculpture, even a film or kinetic work.
He only rarely made bravura independent drawings for the sake of drawing. I
don’t know why - after all, he did have a deft touch and a sense for all graphic
media. This is frustrating. It is almost as if he didn’t want us to see him working,
or “wasting” time or energy on anything self- indulgent or virtuosic. He
must/might have also made informal, less useful private drawings or free
sketches, but where are they now? Were they shredded because they were
thought to be too peripheral?
We are left with a known life’s oeuvre of about three thousand sketches,
drawings and collages dating between the years 1949 to 1997. In them we can
infer a kind of “process” story, a private growth, an evolution into a more public
product. We have focused the core of this exhibition on sequences from the
1970s to the 1990s of serial preliminary sketches that then led to collages, just
before the finished paintings, prints or sculpture. Such series give a sense of the
creative genesis or urgencies in the pure and personal hand and spirit of the
artist. And then we have included various “grandes finales”- the final works - in
their almost unimaginable and colorful large scale and high, technically brilliant
finishes.
We trust that both art specialists and the general public will be engaged and
inspired by these selections and by the inclusion of Lichtenstein’s 1970 Art and
Technology landscape film and his own astonishing and never before seen 1995
studio documentary.
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