Roy Lichtenstein’s Small House is a testament to the brilliance, conceptual rigor, ceaseless reinvention and creativity that defines Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic career. Utilizing the straightforward architecture of a simple, ranch-style home, the crisp white façade of Small House, delineated by rigid black lines and flat planes of red, yellow and turquoise convey Modernist geometric abstraction through Lichtenstein’s trademark Pop vernacular. Small House complicates fixed perspective through its deceivingly concave armature. In a unidirectional presentation, Small House mimics the compositional tendencies of low relief, while dramatically collapsing any visual depth or breach of surface.

Artist Roy Lichtenstein sitting outside his Southampton studio, New York, 1981.
Image © Arthur Schatz/Getty Images. Art © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Nowhere else does Lichtenstein so concisely articulate the iconicity of home as it relates to the semiotics of space, volume and void. The trompe l’oeil volumetric structure of Small House is highly phenomenological, presenting the viewer with a false front while exposing its own visual ruse through charged spatial engagement and inverted structure. In a unidirectional presentation, Small House mimics the compositional tendencies of low relief, while dramatically collapsing any visual depth or breach of surface. Small House is an exploration of visual trickery, exteriority and playful exchange with the viewer.

House I, model 1996, fabricated in 1998, National Gallery of Art
Image © National Gallery of Art / Gift of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Art © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Small House features only the essential details of windows, door, roof, and shutters. The simplicity of the subject’s details is drawn not from a life study, but is instead mediated through the artist’s collection of printed source material, often lowbrow manuals for painting and items from everyday printed media. Lichtenstein begins his sculptural process on the page, with pencil sketches and color studies, then assessing his designs in a full-scale maquette before building the final work. Utilizing the straightforward architecture of a simple, ranch-style home, the subject complicates fixed perspective through its deceivingly concave armature. An important breakthrough during a late-career moment, Small House is perhaps Lichtenstein’s most concise exploration of illusionistic perspective. Where sculpture tends to convey information through three-dimensional form, Lichtenstein breaks with tradition by sticking to pictorial representation. Small House is strongly related to Lichtenstein’s other minimal house sculptures, which range in scale from monumental structures to small interior wall pieces. Held in prestigious collections like the National Gallery of Art, Lichtenstein’s house series is a unique example of an artist producing some of his most refined and exemplary work near the end of his life. Though his legacy is most often evaluated for its contributions to the graphic arts, sculpture occupied a central position in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre from the first time he cast one of his iconic blonde heroines in glazed ceramic in 1965 until his death in 1997. Indeed, the artist’s inclination toward boundary-blurring is nowhere more successful or more apparent than in his sculpted works, whose origins are inseparable from his paintings: here the two disciplines flow freely into and out of one another.