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Roy LICHTENSTEIN, Reflections on Crash REDUCE 1/1


Roy LICHTENSTEIN

United States of America 1923 – 1997


Reflections on Crash 1990
planographic, stencil, relief, collage and embossing colour lithograph, screenprint, woodcut, metalised PVC plastic film collage and embossing printed from eight aluminium plates, three screens, one woodblock with irregularly-shaped, inlaid magnesium plate and one plate assembled from four magnesium plates
Impression: 53/68
Edition: edition of 68 plus 16 artist's proofs; right to print; printer's proof I; printer's proof II; archive copy; cancellation proof
comp 134.8 h x 175.3 w cm
Purchased 1991
Accession No: NGA 91.106
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Licensed by Viscopy

Roy Lichtenstein adopted popular culture of the 1960s—action movies, comics, romantic potboilers, advertisements, manufactured objects and food—as the subject of his art. The fighter pilots and blonde beauties that were depicted in popular culture of that decade appear in the Reflections series, which Lichtenstein made towards the end of his life.

Reflections reinterprets and refines Lichtenstein’s earlier paintings and prints based on cartoons, romance and war comics. In Reflections on Crash, we see the American Indian war pilot Johnny Cloud—the mystical super-hero of Irv Novick’s All-American men of war comic series—glancing back through an aeroplane cockpit in response to the loud explosion of enemy fire, denoted by the words ‘CRASH’. This work brings Lichtenstein full circle with his re-examination of the art of his past.

This series was made in collaboration with the printer Ken Tyler at the Tyler Graphics workshop, established in 1987 at Mount Kisco in New York.


Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010
From: Ron Radford (ed), Collection highlights: National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008