Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Woman with Flowered Hat. Magna on canvas, 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm). Executed in 1963. Estimate in the region of $30,000,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2013.

New York – The Evening Sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art on May 15 will offer Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop masterpiece, Woman with Flowered Hat, which is expected to realize in excess of $30 million.  Lichtenstein draws on Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar from 1949-50, but invents her anew in his revolutionary pop language. Coinciding with Lichtenstein’s major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, the Evening Sale will offer four major works that span the artist’s career, with classic pictures from the early 1960s and mature renderings from the 1980s and 1990s.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman with Flowered Hat is a classic example of Pop Art from the movement’s earliest beginnings. It was painted in 1963, when Lichtenstein was engaged in his most profound investigation of popular imagery. At the age of thirty-eight, the Pop exponent made a drastic and permanent break with a style heavily indebted to Abstract Expressionism. His audacious decision to appropriate commercial illustrations, comic imagery and, in this case, reproductions of modern masterpieces, electrified the artworld and brought him almost instantaneous fame. With works like Woman with Flowered Hat, Lichtenstein went into combat with his heroes and overturned the soul-searching painterliness of the generation before. But this act of transgression was not without deference and respect. As Lichtenstein admitted, "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." 

Lichtenstein painted Woman with Flowered Hat at a time when he was attacking various aspects of the so-called "canon" of art, or rather, what people liked to think of as "High Art." Alongside the “low-art” subject matter of comic strip images, he began pillaging masterworks by the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso as they too had become part of readily available, mass-produced culture. Picasso was a natural target for the artist as his work was so recognizable it essentially was already Pop. Between 1962-63, Lichtenstein produced four paintings based on Picasso portraits. The present painting is based on a postcard sent to Lichtenstein by the owner of the original of painting. Its subject is Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover during the Second World War, whose image was used to reflect the era’s troubled events, as well as the artist’s own capricious emotions. The Dora Maar portraits are famed for their wild colors, distorted forms and the palpable anxiety expressed in her visage. Like the weeping damsels in Lichtenstein’s comic-inspired paintings, Dora is often represented as the archetypal damsel in distress.

In Woman with Flowered Hat Lichtenstein submits these emotive qualities to the dramatic simplification of his comic stylization. The composition retains all the essential features of the original but its nuances of color, texture, form and line have been streamlined by the mock-mechanization of Lichtenstein’s newfound technique. A complex palette has been exchanged for primary colors; subtle tonal modulation replaced by flat planes and Ben Day dots; and a brooding brunette swapped for a sunny, blue-eyed blonde.