1966 Roy Lichtenstein Screenprint
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GUEST:
I inherited it from my late husband. He was working, doing landscaping and landscape design out on Shelter Island, New York. He was designing a gate for one of his clients. He became friendly with the gentleman, and he invited him in to show him some of his art, because they had talked about art. He showed him this, and Peter loved it, and he offered him $80 for it.
APPRAISER:
And when was this, did you say?
GUEST:
This was, like, the late '80s, early '90s.
APPRAISER:
Okay, did he know who the artist was? Was he a collector at all?
GUEST:
Well, I think he was familiar with the name Lichtenstein.
APPRAISER:
Okay.
GUEST:
He thought it was a valuable piece of art, and he also liked the iridescent effect. I mean, it's kind of interesting. I looked up Lichtenstein, and I saw that he did a lot of, like, very large posters type of stuff. But I couldn't find anything on this particular piece.
APPRAISER:
It's unusual. This is a screen print, printed in black, that Lichtenstein made on mirrored colored Rowlux, which is a type of layered plastic with indentations in it. If you feel the surface of the print, you can feel some texture on it.
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
And what that does is, it gives it this optical effect, and the mirror gives it the reflecting. So there's various layers of color in that plastic. And the only part that's printed on it is the black seascape here. It's really amazing. And it was made by Lichtenstein in 1966. And it was an edition print, meaning he made more than one of them.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
Yet when the catalogue raisonné for his prints was being published in the 1980s, they could only find one other example of this image.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
And it was something that Lichtenstein himself published. He self-published this in 1966. He had come to be very well-known for his work, starting in the early '60s, and the Ben-Day dots he was using to reproduce comic book scenes. And that's what he's very well-known for today. That's what brought him his fame.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
He was starting to become famous at the time he made this, and he was also being criticized, at the same time that he was being renowned for his appropriation of comic book scenes, for copying and appropriating the works of other artists. It was only a few years into that fame that he was getting that, I think... My suspicion is that he went out and tried to do something very original, which is what you have in this print. It's signed in felt tip pen, and numbered from an edition of 70. And as I was saying, there's only one other example known of this when they published the catalogue raisonné, and yours is the only one I've ever seen outside of that. He had made two other screen prints like this on Rowlux for his gallerist Leo Castelli in New York in 1964 and 1965, and this smaller one he took on as a project by himself. And it's assumed that it was more or less a failure, that he wasn't able to sell as many as he thought he was going to out of the edition of 70. And perhaps only a few survived.
GUEST:
Holy moly.
APPRAISER:
And my suspicion is that the fellow on Long Island might have gotten it from the artist himself, who, in 1970, had moved out to Southampton and probably had a number of these impressions with him. Because it wasn't for sale publicly. So you have a very scarce, colorful, optically fun, wild print on plastic. If I had to put a replacement value on it today, I would say you need to insure this for around $20,000.
GUEST (laughing in disbelief): Oh, my God. That's incredible. I had no idea. It's a beautiful thing, and...
APPRAISER:
It really is.
GUEST:
Peter would be overjoyed. He would be absolutely overjoyed.
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