Puzzled Portrait by Roy Lichtenstein

Puzzled Portrait 1978

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Copyright: Modern Artists: Artvee

Roy Lichtenstein made this ‘Puzzled Portrait’ using oil and magna on canvas, and it’s like he’s handing us a puzzle in paint. It's a jigsaw of abstract form and flat colour, assembled to suggest a person but only just. The dots, those glorious Ben-Day dots, usually printed, are here painstakingly hand-painted. I can't help but feel the effort. The yellow hair, the green stripes, the bold black outlines—each element is meticulously rendered, so controlled, yet somehow still playful. See how the face is constructed from a grid of red dots? It’s almost as if he's zoomed in, forcing us to confront the building blocks of an image, or even of identity. That little bite taken out of the profile is so suggestive, and keeps the eye moving about the work. Lichtenstein's work is like a conversation with artists such as Picasso. This piece reminds me of the way Picasso used the language of cubism to fragment the human form. But I think Lichtenstein takes it one step further, using the visual language of mass media to explore perception, representation and process.

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