Mirror #3 (Six Panels)

Roy Lichtenstein was perhaps the most consistently inventive artist among the group of individuals who rose to prominence as the progenitors of American Pop Art in the early 1960s. Throughout his career, he explored the functional simplicity and visual clichés that characterize processes of mechanical reproduction. Initially preoccupied with the visual immediacy of cartoons, Lichtenstein embraced the technical constraints of graphic illustration, applying them to painting. Mirror #3 (Six Panels) is among the most ambitious, summarizing canvases in the artist’s Mirror series (1969–72). Like his famous cartoon images, these paintings were inspired by popular culture sources. Studying illustrations from furniture and glass-company catalogues, Lichtenstein familiarized himself with pictorial conventions used to represent reflection. The work also references the long tradition of rendering mirrors in art, a theme that was explored by artists from Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso. Lichtenstein was perhaps most invested, however, in broadly generic questions of surface and support. Only stylized gleam and shadow are reflected in his mirror; thus, the puzzling, fragmented, even conceptual abstraction becomes the real subject of the work.