American, 1923-1997
Double Glass, 1979-80 Painted and patinated bronze, 56 x 42 x 17 in. (142.2 x 106.7 x 43.2 cm.)
Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas
1980.A.04
Label Text
Like the slightly earlier Goldfish Bowl and Cup and Saucer (Cowart, 1981, pp. 151, and 154), Lichtenstein's Double Glass materializes a motif from his still-life paintings and carries on the cross-media exchanges that had characterized his work in sculpture since the ceramic Head and Cup and Saucer series of 1964-66. In his sculptures of the late seventies, a resolute flatness emerged that, together with discontinuous opening and contours, complex mixtures of shadow and reflections, and coloration at once illusionistic and abstract, produced a dialectical play between pictorial and sculptural qualities and between illusion and reality. Such strategies hark back to Cubist assemblage, but take on new force through Lichtenstein's large scale and brilliant color.
The glass vessel in general and the drinking glass in particular, with the complex potentials offered by transparency, reflections, and flattened ovoid shapes, seem to have held special appeal for Lichtenstein in his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality. At least four versions of a single glass predate the still more complex Double Glass, with its interlocking forms and increased spatial ambiguities. A painting from 1974 shows a double glass produced as a mirror reflection (Cowart, 1981, p. 46), and a study for the sculpture dates from c. 1979 (colored pencil on paper; exhibited in Roy Lichtenstein as Sculptor, Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina, 1985, cat. no. 40). As was his custom, Lichtenstein first made a painted wooden maquette of the Double Glass (collection of the artist), which served as the model for the bronze mold. An edition of three bronzes are marked 1979, the casting and painting was not completed until 1980, which is the date generally given for this work.