Roy Lichtenstein – Cathedrals and Haystacks — Sample Portfolio (Complete Set of 13) 1969

Cathedrals and Haystacks — Sample Portfolio (Complete Set of 13) 1969

Artist: Roy Lichtenstein
Title: Cathedrals and Haystacks — Sample Portfolio
Year: 1969
Medium: Lithographs in colours (complete set of 13)
Dimensions: 16 × 24 cm (6 3/8 × 9 3/8 in) each
Printer: Blair Litho, Los Angeles
Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles
Presentation: Complete portfolio — original slipcase and information bi-fold included
Type: Complete limited edition portfolio — 13 lithographs

Description : 

Cathedrals and Haystacks — Sample Portfolio (1969) is one of the most formally inventive and art-historically charged projects in Roy Lichtenstein’s print catalogue — a complete set of thirteen lithographs in colours published by Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, the prestigious workshop that produced some of the most significant American print editions of the 1960s and 1970s. The portfolio takes as its conceptual source two of the most celebrated series in the history of Impressionism — Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and his Haystacks — and subjects them to Lichtenstein’s signature graphic transformation: the Impressionist dissolution of form into light and colour rebuilt as a tight, mechanical grid of Ben-Day dots.

The conceit is characteristically precise and characteristically witty. Monet’s Cathedral and Haystacks series were themselves investigations of how a single subject changes across different conditions of light, time, and atmosphere — serial studies in perception and representation. Lichtenstein takes this already reflexive project and pushes it one step further: his dots impose a photomechanical grid over the Impressionist surface, replacing the individual brushstroke — the mark of the artist’s direct physical presence — with the impersonal, reproducible unit of commercial printing. What Monet dissolved into atmospheric shimmer, Lichtenstein resolidifies into pure graphic structure.

The thirteen prints traverse the full chromatic range of the two source series — red, yellow, blue-red, black-white, blue-black, red-on-red, coral, yellow, pink-red, olive, lavender, periwinkle, deep navy — each one a distinct colour proposition within the same formal system, the portfolio as a whole functioning as both a homage and a deconstruction of Monet’s serial method.

Published by Gemini G.E.L. — the Los Angeles workshop that worked with Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella on their most important print projects — and printed by Blair Litho, Los Angeles. Sold complete with the original slipcase and information bi-fold as issued.