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拍品专文
A playful commentary on the transformative power of art, Yellow Apple (1981) belongs to Roy Lichtenstein’s acclaimed series of bronze still-life sculptures. It comprises the outline of an archetypal apple encircling a cartoonish rendering of a yellow brushstroke, both floating above a smooth circular base. The bronze is painted white, yellow and black, disguising the metal in opaque, comic-book colour. Lichtenstein captures the mutability of a brushstroke and the organic shape of an apple in solid form with characteristic wit. The choice of the apple—a mundane object, but also a classic subject in painting, from Paul Cezanne’s still-lives to René Magritte’s dreamlike visions—hovers between everyday life and art history. Other works from the edition of Yellow Apple have been widely exhibited, including in Lichtenstein’s 2012 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, which travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Tate Modern, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris. One can be seen alongside masterpieces of twentieth-century art in photographs of legendary New York dealer Leo Castelli’s living room.
Alongside Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was the most significant figure in Pop Art. He emerged in the 1960s with works that adopted the bold outlines and block colours of comic strips, shattering hierarchies of high and low culture. He became particularly well-known for manually replicating the mechanical Ben Day dots used by printers to create darker areas of colour and shadow. In 1965 he began a series of paintings taking brushstrokes as their subject, parodying the obsession with spontaneity and painterly expressiveness in Abstract Expressionist art. ‘Lichtenstein’, writes Frederic Tuten, ‘seizes the most apparent aspect of Abstract Expressionism, its bravura strokes and rhetorical painterliness, and encapsulates it in a single image created with precision and much forethought’ (Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, exh. cat., 65 Thompson Street, New York, 1989, p. 12).
In the early 1980s Lichtenstein began translating his subjects to sculpture, while also expanding his interest in the traditional form of the still life. Lichtenstein created these works through a technique of lost wax casting. He began with drawn studies before creating a wooden maquette. This would then be used to create a lost wax mould, from which he would steam out the wax before molten metal was poured inside, playing with the artistic potential of semi-industrial processes. In the resulting sculptures, depicted objects are flattened into two dimensions and reborn in a different three-dimensional form. Yellow Apple is a virtuosic example of this subversive practice, caught between movement and stasis, flatness and materiality, and high art and popular culture.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.
Alongside Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was the most significant figure in Pop Art. He emerged in the 1960s with works that adopted the bold outlines and block colours of comic strips, shattering hierarchies of high and low culture. He became particularly well-known for manually replicating the mechanical Ben Day dots used by printers to create darker areas of colour and shadow. In 1965 he began a series of paintings taking brushstrokes as their subject, parodying the obsession with spontaneity and painterly expressiveness in Abstract Expressionist art. ‘Lichtenstein’, writes Frederic Tuten, ‘seizes the most apparent aspect of Abstract Expressionism, its bravura strokes and rhetorical painterliness, and encapsulates it in a single image created with precision and much forethought’ (Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, exh. cat., 65 Thompson Street, New York, 1989, p. 12).
In the early 1980s Lichtenstein began translating his subjects to sculpture, while also expanding his interest in the traditional form of the still life. Lichtenstein created these works through a technique of lost wax casting. He began with drawn studies before creating a wooden maquette. This would then be used to create a lost wax mould, from which he would steam out the wax before molten metal was poured inside, playing with the artistic potential of semi-industrial processes. In the resulting sculptures, depicted objects are flattened into two dimensions and reborn in a different three-dimensional form. Yellow Apple is a virtuosic example of this subversive practice, caught between movement and stasis, flatness and materiality, and high art and popular culture.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.