1973
Offset lithograph on heavy smooth poster paper
63 x 74 cm | 25 x 29 in
Unsigned, as issued
Published by the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Printed in France by Nouvelles Images S.A., Lombreuil
✔ Original 1970s printing
✔ Limited edition
✔ Mint condition
FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE
Sailboats is Lichtenstein’s harbour, broken apart and reassembled as flat interlocking shapes: sails as overlapping triangles and sickle curves, masts as thin verticals, hulls as flattened crescents, all bounded by heavy black contours. The palette is deliberately tight — cadmium yellow, deep crimson, cool grey, black and white, with a single cobalt accent. What carries the image is the water, rendered as dense blue diagonal hatching overlaid with white scalloped wave-crests: a purely graphic shorthand for moving water, closer to Synthetic Cubism than to the comic-strip panels that made his name.
The sheet reproduces Sailboats, 1973 — acrylic, oil and graphite pencil on canvas, 152.6 × 188.2 cm — the first and largest of a cycle of three, shown that autumn in a Leo Castelli-organised exhibition in Zurich. The painting belongs to Lichtenstein’s Cubist turn of the early 1970s, between the Mirrors and the Entablatures; the sailboat itself is one of the few motifs he returned to across thirty years, from the Rowlux seascapes of 1964 to a study made in 1997, the year he died.
Published by Castelli and printed offset in France by Nouvelles Images S.A. at Lombreuil — the house that issued Braque, Monet and Keith Haring — on heavy smooth stock that holds the flat colour fields and fine diagonal screens cleanly.
1973
Offset lithograph on heavy smooth poster paper
63 x 74 cm | 25 x 29 in
Unsigned, as issued
Published by the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Printed in France by Nouvelles Images S.A., Lombreuil
✔ Original 1970s printing
✔ Limited edition
✔ Mint condition
FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE
Sailboats is Lichtenstein’s harbour, broken apart and reassembled as flat interlocking shapes: sails as overlapping triangles and sickle curves, masts as thin verticals, hulls as flattened crescents, all bounded by heavy black contours. The palette is deliberately tight — cadmium yellow, deep crimson, cool grey, black and white, with a single cobalt accent. What carries the image is the water, rendered as dense blue diagonal hatching overlaid with white scalloped wave-crests: a purely graphic shorthand for moving water, closer to Synthetic Cubism than to the comic-strip panels that made his name.
The sheet reproduces Sailboats, 1973 — acrylic, oil and graphite pencil on canvas, 152.6 × 188.2 cm — the first and largest of a cycle of three, shown that autumn in a Leo Castelli-organised exhibition in Zurich. The painting belongs to Lichtenstein’s Cubist turn of the early 1970s, between the Mirrors and the Entablatures; the sailboat itself is one of the few motifs he returned to across thirty years, from the Rowlux seascapes of 1964 to a study made in 1997, the year he died.
Published by Castelli and printed offset in France by Nouvelles Images S.A. at Lombreuil — the house that issued Braque, Monet and Keith Haring — on heavy smooth stock that holds the flat colour fields and fine diagonal screens cleanly.
