Roy Lichtenstein’s Nude with Yellow Pillow is a stunning display of the artist’s mastery in printmaking. The work belongs to his nine-part Nudes series, one of the most coveted series of prints by the famed Pop artist. In the present work, the artist nods to the place of the nude in art history, using the print medium to put an innovative twist on a traditional subject. Lichtenstein revisits elements of Pop Art that defined his early career and which made him famous - flat blocks of primary color, bold outlines, familiar Ben-Day dot patterns and, most compellingly, his iconic female subject that derived from 1960s comic books. The work was published at Tyler Graphics in Mount Kisco, New York under the direction of Kenneth Tyler, an influential master printmaker known for his experimental collaborations with some of the best artists of the twentieth century.

Roy Lichtenstein was an American artist known for his paintings and prints which referenced commercial art and popular culture icons. Composed using Ben-Day dots—the method used by newspapers and comic strips to denote gradients and texture—Lichtenstein’s work mimicked the mechanical technique with his own hand on a much larger scale. He was a leading figure in establishing the Pop Art movement, along with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. “I take a cliché and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial,” he once said of his work. Born in 1923 in New York, New York, he studied painting under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York. Lichtenstein began teaching art at Rutgers University in New Jersey during the late 1950s, meeting fellow faculty members involved in the New York art scene and showing work with Leo Castelli gallery. Themes of irony and cliché prevailed throughout the remainder of Lichtenstein’s career, as evinced in his Haystacks (1969), a take on the canonical series by Claude Monet. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Modern in London.

The present example has been in the same private collection since 2008.

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