Galleries
A Sharp Eye For Pop Art
Laurie Lambrecht brings focus to the swirling patterns in Roy Lichtenstein’s world
By Cate McQuaid
Laurie Lambrecht’s color photographs of Roy Lichtenstein’s studio document the
great 20th-century pop artist at work. They are also works of art in themselves. The
photos, on view at Victoria Munroe Fine Art on Newbury Street, please and
challenge the eye on many levels.
Lambrecht was Lichtenstein’s executive assistant in the early 1990s. She brought
her Hasselblad camera to work with her, and captured open notebooks, bits of
commercial illustration clipped and arrayed together, and half-worked paintings. A
motif arises with several variations of Lichtenstein’s “Girl With Tear,’’ comprising an
eye, a tear, and a yellow lock of hair, which was inspired by Picasso’s series of
weeping women. He sketches it, he photographs an image of it and tapes it on a
heating duct beside two drawings, he paints a new version.
“Sketchbook With Surrealist Girl,’’ features a pair of eyeglasses lying across two
open books — one featuring an earlier version of Lichtenstein’s “Girl With Tear’’
and the other sporting a sketch of that image. We get a sense of all the iterations,
from commercial reproductions to drawings, that Lichtenstein experimented with.
The glasses, a metaphor for the artist’s eye, reference André Kertesz’s famous
1926 photo of Mondrian’s glasses and pipe.
Lambrecht’s own eye falls on sharply composed patterns and arrangements, as in
“Pencils,’’ in which several colored pencils, some boxed and others just piled
together, lie on sheets of paper covered with diagonal lines. Other items disrupt the
retinal buzz, but the piece implies that Lichtenstein’s studio was a world spinning
with pattern. The square format of the Hasselblad prints emphasizes the spin,
ramping up compositional tension with its symmetry.
Then there’s the layering of photographic reality against Lichtenstein’s graphically
stylized vision. In “Roy in Van Gogh’s Bedroom,’’ the artist stands before his own
large-scale take of Van Gogh’s famous interior. Lichtenstein’s version of the
bedroom’s wooden floor is an eye-popping green wood grain pattern; the walls are
covered with his trademark dots and diagonals; the chairs, here half-finished, have
been updated to 20th-century modern design. The painting fills most of the frame,
pulling the viewer into Lichtenstein’s flattened world, so it’s startling to see
Lichtenstein himself, and not a cartoon, standing virtually inside his painted
bedroom, with his back to us.
A second show, “From the Studio of Roy Lichtenstein: Photographs by Laurie
Lambrecht,’’ opens tomorrow, in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of
Photography in Winchester.
LAURIE LAMBRECHT: In Roy Lichtenstein’s Studio: 1990-1992
At Victoria Munroe Fine Art, 161 Newbury St, Boston, MA
Through Dec. 4. 617-523-0661
www.victoriamunroefineart.com
LAURIE LAMBRECHT: From the Studio of Roy Lichtenstein
At the Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Rd, Winchester, MA
Through Jan 23, 2011. 781-729-1158
www.griffinmuseum.org