Brushstroke with Spatter 1966

Roy Lichtenstein created "Brushstroke with Spatter" using oil and magna on canvas. Here, bright yellow and blue strokes dramatically slash across a pale pink canvas, overlaid with a pattern of dots. The Ben-Day dots, simulating comic printing, flatten the image and emphasize its artificiality. This work becomes an exploration of signs and signifiers. Lichtenstein isolates the brushstroke, an element charged with expressive potential, and renders it as a bold, graphic symbol. This calculated approach challenges the Abstract Expressionists' emphasis on spontaneous gesture and subjective emotion, instead examining how these gestures are communicated and understood within a broader cultural context. The clean, graphic precision of Lichtenstein's work is deliberately impersonal. The very act of painting becomes a subject, dissected and presented with a detached irony. Lichtenstein doesn't merely reproduce an image; he studies the language of painting itself. The painting becomes a sign, referring to a painting, highlighting how signs themselves can become empty of meaning through repetition and commodification.