Two Nudes by Roy Lichtenstein

The Nudes series was Lichtenstein's last great series of works, which were created in 1993. In creating the series, he took the classic form of the nude and transformed it using his signature pop art language. The works are especially interesting and prominent due to the balance between geometrical shaps and the curvilinear form of the female body.

Two Nudes from the Nude series. Adopting the traditional nude from antiquity, Lichtenstein embraces the popularity of the subject matter and applies relief print techniques. The reproduction of the nudes is representative of Lichtenstein's reason to appeal to the public interest in visual culture, past and present.

Like Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne before him, Lichtenstein returned to the motif of the female form late in life. He engaged this enduring arthistorical subject in provocative ways with his Nudes of the mid-1990s. Unlike traditional depictions based on live models, these women are inventions. Their origins can be traced to the artist's archive of comicbook clippings, some dating back to the 1960s. While his sources were most often altered to achieve greater compositional clarity, here there is one key difference: the originally clothed heroines are now undressed. In early Pop works, the artist crafted scenes from a single cartoon panel; in this series, the works are often a composite of women drawn from multiple panels.