Bidspirit auction | Roy Lichtenstein ”Sandwich & Soda”

Roy Lichtenstein ”Sandwich & Soda” X+X Screenprint - Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997). Pop Art screenprint in colors on clear plastic titled ”Sandwich and Soda” from ”X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), ” 1964. This portfolio was an edition of 500 published by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and printed by Ives-Sillman, Inc., New Haven, Connecticut. The work is accompanied by an original ”X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters)” portfolio cover. Lot essay: As a leading figure of the late 20th-century Pop Art movement, Roy Lichtenstein consistently challenged traditional artistic canons. Raised in New York City, he demonstrated an early passion for the arts, frequently visiting the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art in his youth, before enrolling at Ohio State University in 1940. His studies were interrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into World War II, during which he sketched extensively while serving in France, Belgium, and Germany. By the late 1940s, Lichtenstein began drawing iconography from printed media, often satirizing 19th-century American genre paintings and creating depictions of Mythic America. Lichtenstein's definitive breakthrough came during the 1960s commercial advertising boom, when he began sourcing imagery from comic books and advertisements. To bring the look of mechanical reproduction into fine art, he developed a rigorous manual process: copying a source image by hand, adjusting its composition, and projecting the altered sketch onto a canvas. Using perforated templates, he replicated an exaggerated version of the dot complex common in commercial printing, which would become known as Lichtenstein's iconic Ben-Day dots. These transformations often involved reducing his palette to saturated primary colors, eliminating incidental details, heightening contrasts, and emphasizing the graphic codes of mass media. Throughout his career, Lichtenstein merged concepts that were often viewed in opposition to one another, including reality and artificiality, fine art and mass culture, abstraction and figuration, and the manual and mechanical, to reveal their interconnectedness within his art. (Sandwich & Soda) Sight; height: 19 1/2 in x width: 23 1/2 in. Framed; height: 20 1/4 in x width: 24 1/4 in x depth: 1 in. (Portfolio cover) Height: 24 in x width: 20 in. Condition: To the print, there are no visible tears or losses. Very light undulation and a few light scuffs along the plastic. Framed under plexiglass. Light wear to the frame. Not inspected out of frame. To the portfolio cover, there are tears and losses along the extreme edges. The cover is toned. There are scattered areas of soiling, foxing, and moisture exposure. There are a few residual inscriptions along the cover.