LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
ARTS & COLLECTIBLES
BEFORE THE
IMAGE WAS FINISHED
In the final year of his life, Roy Lichtenstein left behind studies, collages and unrealized commissions that reveal something his immaculate finished surfaces often concealed: the hand, hesitation and revision behind the image.
SAMANTHA GREENE
Roy Lichtenstein, Bellagio Hotel Mural: Still Life with Reclining Nude (Study), 1997. Collage and graphite pencil on board: sheet, 38 5/8 × 54 5/16 in. (98.1 × 138 cm); image, 36 1/2 × 52 3/16 in. (92.7 × 132.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation 2019.79. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2026
Roy Lichtenstein spent much of his career making images look as though the artist had nearly disappeared from them. The bold outlines, flattened forms and Ben-Day dots that made his work instantly recognizable borrowed the visual language of mechanical reproduction. Comic strips, advertising and mass media were transformed into paintings whose surfaces could appear cool, controlled and almost industrial in their precision.
Then came 1997. In the final year of his life, at age 73, Lichtenstein was still working at considerable scale, with two mural commissions, several large sculptures and a new series of prints underway alongside his studio practice. At the same time, he was expanding his familiar palette with mint green, turquoise, coral and cyan and beginning to dispense with some of the heavy black outlines that had defined his earlier work.
What survives from that period is unusually revealing. When Lichtenstein died unexpectedly in September 1997, a number of projects remained unfinished. Some were later fabricated or completed posthumously; others exist only as sketches, models and studies. Now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Roy Lichtenstein: 1997, these materials allow the process behind an artist associated with highly resolved surfaces to remain visible.
Pencil lines remain pencil lines. Pieces of paper have been cut, moved and assembled. Compositions have not yet reached the point at which the evidence of making disappears. The distinction matters because the finished Lichtenstein can give the impression of inevitability, as if every black line and field of color arrived fully formed. The studies complicate that perception, showing an artist testing scale, rearranging forms and allowing an image to remain unresolved long enough to discover what it might become.
Among the projects occupying him were two ambitious mural commissions that would have moved his work beyond the conventional boundaries of the canvas. One was intended for the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, where architect Renzo Piano invited Lichtenstein to contribute a mural. Another proposal came from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where Lichtenstein was considering a pair of murals for the hotel lobby.
Roy Lichtenstein, Bellagio Hotel Mural: Interior with Painting of Reclining Nude (Study), 1997. Collage and graphite pencil on board: sheet, 36 × 51 3/4 in. (91.4 × 131.4 cm); mount, 38 × 52 7/8 in. (96.5 × 134.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation 2019.78. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2026
The Bellagio studies are particularly telling. In Bellagio Hotel Mural: Still Life with Reclining Nude (Study), Lichtenstein experimented with colored outlines and the flattening of perspective within an interior. The composition is densely constructed, with furniture, plants, books, pattern and fragments of art history occupying the same compressed space.
There is an elegant reversal in that project. For decades, Lichtenstein had taken images from the visual world and flattened them into paintings. Now he was considering how one of those images might occupy an architectural space again. The mural would not simply hang within an interior; it would participate in the interior itself.
That shift feels especially significant when seen through the surviving studies. The collage process allowed Lichtenstein to move pieces around physically before committing them to a larger composition. The apparent mechanical certainty of the finished work began, quite literally, with a hand arranging fragments. The same tension appears elsewhere in his late practice, as Lichtenstein continued to recycle motifs from his own earlier work, including pyramids and brushstrokes, while also referring to figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Henri Matisse. His later palette became brighter and more unexpected, while the reduction of the heavy black outline brought the work closer to the emerging aesthetics of the digital age.
Whitney curatorial research associate David Crane describes these unfinished works as offering a rare glimpse at “the artist’s hand at work.” It is a particularly resonant observation for Lichtenstein, whose career was built partly on the productive contradiction between handmade painting and the appearance of mass production. In the unfinished work, that contradiction becomes visible rather than conceptual.
That may be what makes these final studies so compelling. They do not diminish the precision associated with Lichtenstein’s finished paintings. They reveal how much looking, moving, reconsidering and making had to occur before that precision could exist. We are accustomed to seeing the completed Lichtenstein: polished, flattened and apparently certain. The unfinished Lichtenstein offers something rarer, the moment before certainty.
Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through June 1, 2027.
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