| Woman with Flowered Hat | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Roy Lichtenstein |
| Year | 1963 |
| Medium | Magna on canvas |
| Movement | Pop art |
| Dimensions | 127 cm× 101.6 cm(50 in× 40 in) |
| Location | Collection of Laurence Graff |
Woman with Flowered Hat is a 1963 pop art painting with Magna on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein. [1] The work is based on a Pablo Picasso portrait of Dora Maar. [2] In May 2013, it sold for a record price for a Lichtenstein work. [3] [4]
Picasso painted several portraits of his lover Dora Maar in which her face is distorted in a manner similar to Lichtenstein's painting. Such portraits were an expressionist development of the fragmented forms of his earlier Cubist works. [5] A 1941 Picasso of Maar entitled Dora Maar au Chat sold at auction for $95,216,000 in 2006. [6]
Lichtenstein specifically used the 1939-40 portrait of Maar in the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection as the template for Woman with Flowered Hat. [7] Neumann himself had sent a reproduction of the portrait to Lichtenstein after seeing one of Lichtenstein's earlier reworkings of a Picasso painting. [7] [1] [2] [5]
Lichtenstein painted Woman with Flowered Hat when he was pastiching various types of sources, including commercial illustrations, comic imagery and modernist masterpieces. The masterpieces represented what could have been dubbed the "canon" of art and was thought of as "high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images. His masterworks sources included the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso. During this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." [8] The painting is one of four variations on Picassos that Lichtenstein created during 1962 and 1963. [1]
Lichtenstein worked by creating a small-scale line-drawing based on the Picasso reproduction. He then projected the drawing onto the canvas, using the projected outline-drawing as a template. [7] The artist deliberately avoided the easier option of projecting the reproduction itself. According to art scholar Michael Fitzgerald, this was because he wanted to be "true to his discipline of drawing". [7] Lichtenstein attached the reproduction to the wall of his studio next to the painting as he worked on it. A photograph of the artist with the work in progress can be seen in an article on Lichtenstein that appeared in Life magazine at the time. [7] [9] Such evidence makes Woman with Flowered Hat "the most thoroughly documented of his variations after Picasso". [7] Discussing the painting with Richard Brown Baker, Lichtenstein commented,
There are some changes in this from the Picasso, obviously complete changes all over, but the more obvious ones: I've changed the face-color to the pink dots and the hair-color to the yellow, since all my girls have yellow hair, almost all of them do. And I was curious to see what it would look like with a more pseudo-realistic color, sort of correcting Picasso, as though he had made an error in painting the face blue. And one of the purposes of it is to make what looks like an insensitive reproduction of the Picasso, and changing the color of the face and hair to ones that would be more conventional would be part of that insensitivity, and there is a general change in the shape of the whole position of the head. [7] [10]
On May 15, 2013, the painting sold for $56.1 million, including fees, at Christie's. It was bought by jeweller Laurence Graff who said: "It's a masterpiece and when you see a major one like this come up for sale, you only get one chance to get it...Plus, I've got a big birthday coming up." [3] Graff, whose 75th birthday is on June 13, outbid three telephone bidders with a winning bid of $50 million and auction fees that brought the total to $56.1 million. [4] The auction, which was expected to exceed $30 million, coincided with the Lichtenstein retrospective being held at the Tate Modern. [8] The retrospective had visited The Art Institute of Chicago from May 16 to September 3, 2012 and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from October 14, 2012 to January 13, 2013 before its February 21 to May 27 run at the Tate Modern and finale at The Centre Pompidou from July 3 to November 4, 2013. [11] On May 9, 2012, the painting Sleeping Girl (1964) from the collection of Beatrice and Phillip Gersh had established the previous Lichtenstein record $44.8 million at Sotheby's. [12] [13]
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.
August Robert Ludwig Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter. He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him. Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War.
Dora Maar au Chat is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in 1941 and depicts Dora Maar, the artist's lover, seated on a chair with a small cat perched on her shoulders. The painting is listed as one of the most expensive paintings, after achieving a price of $95 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006. It is currently the sixth-highest-selling painting by Picasso.
The Weeping Woman is a series of oil on canvas paintings by Pablo Picasso, the last of which was created in late 1937. The paintings depict Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress and muse. The Weeping Woman paintings were produced by Picasso in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and are closely associated with the iconography in his painting Guernica. Picasso was intrigued with the subject of the weeping woman, and revisited the theme numerous times that year. The last version, created on 26 October 1937, was the most elaborate of the series, and has been housed in the collection of the Tate Modern in London since 1987. Another Weeping Woman painting created on 18 October 1937 is housed at the National Gallery of Victoria and was involved in a high-profile political art theft.
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is a 1932 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, featuring his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter.
La Lecture is a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed in January 1932. The oil painting depicts Picasso's mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, asleep with a book upon her lap. The painting led to the breakup of Picasso's marriage to Olga Khokhlova after she saw it at a retrospective exhibition and realised that the facial features were not her own. The painting went to auction in 1989 and in 1996, where it failed to sell. In January 2011, it was announced that La Lecture would be going to auction on 8 February. The painting, which had not been seen in Europe since the exhibition, was then displayed at Sotheby's in Paris.
Drowning Girl is a 1963 American painting in oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein, based on original art by Tony Abruzzo. The painting is considered among Lichtenstein's most significant works, perhaps on a par with his acclaimed 1963 diptych Whaam!. One of the most representative paintings of the pop art movement, Drowning Girl was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1971.
Sleeping Girl is a 1964 oil and Magna on canvas pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It held the record for the highest auction price for a Lichtenstein painting from May 2012 until May 2013.
I Can See the Whole Room...and There's Nobody in It! is a 1961 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is a painting of a man looking through a peephole. It formerly held the record for highest auction price for a Lichtenstein painting.
In the Car is a 1963 pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein. The smaller, older of the two versions of this painting formerly held the record for highest auction price for a Lichtenstein painting. The larger version has been in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh since 1980.
Happy Tears is a 1964 pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It formerly held the record for highest auction price for a Lichtenstein painting.
Hopeless is a 1963 painting with oil paint and acrylic paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein. The painting is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Yo, Picasso, is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he painted in 1901. It is a self-portrait of the artist that depicts him in his youth, aged 19. The painting was created at the beginning of Picasso's Blue Period. On 9 May 1989, the painting sold at Sotheby's, achieving a price of $47.85 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings sold up to that date.
Portrait of Dora Maar is a 1937 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts Dora Maar,, the painter's lover, seated on a chair. It is part of the collection of the Musée Picasso, in Paris, where it is considered to be one of Picasso's masterpieces.
Femme au Chien is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he painted in 1962. It is a portrait of Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque, and their dog Kaboul, an Afghan Greyhound. The painting is an illustration of the great affection that Picasso displayed for both of the subjects in the portrait and has elements of the cubist style that he pioneered. It was produced in Picasso's later years when the couple was living at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, near Mougins, France. On 14 May 2019, it was sold at Sotheby's auction for almost $55 million and is now housed in the collection of Wynn Fine Art in Florida.
Woman's Head is a 1939 oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It is a depiction of Dora Maar, Picasso's companion at the time. Picasso donated the work to the people of Greece in recognition of their resistance against the Axis during the Second World War. Woman's Head was first exhibited in 1949, alongside other donated works, at the Institut Français in Athens. It was not shown again until an exhibition starting in 1980 at the National Gallery and was on continuous show from 2011 until the gallery closed for renovation in 2012. In January 2012 Woman's Head was stolen from the closed gallery, alongside a painting by Piet Mondrian. It was recovered from a gorge near Athens in June 2021 and the alleged thief was arrested.
Girl with a Red Beret and Pompom is a 1937 painting by Pablo Picasso. It hangs in the main reception area of the private member's club Annabel's in Berkeley Square in London's Mayfair district.
