Has there ever been a more unlikely subject for a sculpture than a brushstroke? Even at its most forceful, in the sweeping, dripping gestures of a painter such as Willem de Kooning, a brushstroke is still bound to the canvas, maybe rising in slight impasto relief. Yet in the 1980s, Roy Lichtenstein began an ongoing series of sculptures in which colorful brushstrokes—set free from their support—leaned on one another, wove in and out of flowing grids, or ascended skyward.
More than two dozen works in the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation’s 2023 gift to the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art center on the artist’s Brushstroke sculptures: bronze and cherrywood versions; paper and foamcore maquettes for monumental projects; sketches exploring compositional and coloristic possibilities; and stencils for individual elements. They offer a fascinating view into Lichtenstein’s imagination and sense of creative play as he explored the sculptural possibilities of the liquid traces left by the drag of a paintbrush.
Lichtenstein had earlier considered the subject of brushstrokes in the mid-1960s, following the advent of his Pop paintings based on images from comic books. In 1965, he made one such work, based on a frame from the 1964 comic book Strange Suspense Stories No. 72, that rendered dramatic brushstrokes and several drips; at the lower edge of the canvas, the hand executing these swaths was just visible. From that composition, Lichtenstein moved to creating paintings that isolated gigantic brushstrokes of his own design. Despite the initial impression of spontaneity in their appearance, these works were clearly carefully planned and executed—incisive parodies of the Abstract Expressionist generation of artists who preceded Lichtenstein and who equated the dramatic, dripping application of paint with expressive sincerity. Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke paintings instead implied that these markers of individual identity were as conventional as any other type of image, as he explained: “Of course visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture; but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of a grand gesture.”
Lichtenstein’s mid-1960s Brushstroke paintings often presented their dripping flourishes against a backdrop of the artist’s by-then signature Ben-Day dots, based on a commercial printing process that used screens of small dots to create the appearance of various tonal ranges, such as a figure’s skin color. They looked as neutral as conventional brushstrokes appeared to be grand. Prior to the Brushstroke paintings, however, Lichtenstein treated one element of his comic-strip paintings with curving, undulating rhythms: the flowing, often blond, hair of his heroines. This is evident in the sculptures he made the same year as he began exploring the brushstroke; several ceramic heads, including the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Head with Blue Shadow (1965), juxtapose a swirling bouffant of hair with dots arrayed across the figure’s face to indicate skin tone and shadow—a bold, if not absurd, addition to make to a three-dimensional object.
Still, few other stylistic concepts provided as much inspiration to Lichtenstein as the abstract, elemental motif of the brushstroke. Returning to it in the 1980s, he began adapting it not only to freestanding sculptural contexts but to monumental settings as well. To do so, he had to conceive of brushstrokes capable of defying gravity.
In Three Brushstrokes (1983), Lichtenstein isolated a trio of strokes, each rendered in one of the primary colors—red, yellow, blue—with strong linear elements of black and white as exaggerated indications of each brushstroke’s interior contours. Now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the completed aluminum sculpture stands more than 10 feet high; a study and two maquettes, owned by the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, suggest Lichtenstein’s thought process as he considered the ways the three brushstrokes might interact with one another. Slotting the yellow stroke into the blue one defies the way that paint would normally behave, as does the red stroke that props up its yellow neighbor. The brushstrokes’ overall configuration appears almost anthropomorphic, evoking the relaxed posture of a classical statue.
Likewise, in a group of six cherrywood reliefs from 1985–86, Lichtenstein explored such fantastical possibilities even more intensively, with brushstrokes weaving in and out of each other like basketry. He created separate images of each brushstroke element in a group of related studies on paper, rendering their colors and shapes relative to one another and spreading them across the page like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle being fit together.
Most of the Brushstroke sculptures are abstract, which allowed the artist full reign to play with their formal elements. In an important exception, Lichtenstein’s interests came full circle in the monumental Barcelona Head, a maquette for which is part of the Foundation’s gift. In an approach that yields a surprisingly surrealistic work, Lichtenstein imagined a head composed of two longstanding elements of his paintings: brushstrokes and dots. The combination of swooping gestures and gridded circles harkens back to Head with Blue Shadow, but instead of the older work’s tightly focused composition, Barcelona Head seems about to fly apart, its elements resolving into a woman’s head through a momentary alignment of forces. Here and elsewhere, Lichtenstein’s masterly formal control and wide-ranging ingenuity were nurtured by frequent moments of experimentation and play, as seen in a gift brimming with behind-the-scenes insights into the artist’s inventive practice.
In early 2026, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center will display works selected from the shared gift from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Captions:
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke V, 1985–86. Painted cherrywood. 60 x 31 x 13 inches (152.4 x 78.7 x 33 cm). © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Celebration of the Centennial of Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein, Three Brushstrokes (Study), c. 1983. Cut painted paper, graphite pencil on board. 40 1/4 x 30 1/2 inches (102.2 x 77.5 cm). © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Celebration of the Centennial of Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein, Barcelona Head (Maquette), 1987. Cut painted paper, cut printed paper, graphite pencil on foamcore, T-pins, ball head pins. 36 13/16 x 22 1/8 x 15 inches (93.4 x 56 x 38 cm). © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Celebration of the Centennial of Roy Lichtenstein