Pop Art Prints & Multiples Available at Dane Fine Art

Dane Fine Art’s January 26, 2023 Luxor Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art particularly focuses on fine Pop Art prints and contemporary multiples. Offering over 1,000 lots from well-known American artists, the catalog features a wide range of works that comment on society and the state of popular culture. Among the top items are lithographs from three iconic artists of the Pop Art movement: Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Robert Indiana

American artist Robert Indiana was perhaps best known for his iconic Love sculpture, which has become one of the most recognizable and most plagiarized works of 20th-century art. Maxwell Anderson, the former director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, described Indiana as “an artist of consequence who gets mistaken for a one-hit wonder,” someone who had a significant but often-overlooked role in the rise of Pop Art. He explored the American Dream from many opposing angles, often highlighting the gap between the country’s intentions and its reality. Indiana was also among the first artists to focus exclusively on word art.

The upcoming auction will feature a Pop Art print that Robert Indiana designed in 2008 for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign (lot #0008; estimate: USD 13,000 – $18,000). The design riffs on Indiana’s original Love composition, including a forward-leaning O. The available screenprint was created in 2012 and features a blue-gray gradient against a bright yellow background.

Roy Lichtenstein 

Another leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Roy Lichtenstein, fully embraced parody and criticism of American popular culture. Lichtenstein was intrigued by commercial printing and comic books, both of which used Ben-Day dots to create color, texture, and depth. In his work, Lichtenstein used tongue-in-cheek humor to approach the subjects that dominated American popular culture at the time. “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong,” the artist later stated, “usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques.”

A signed 1964 Pop Art print of Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl is available in the upcoming Dane Fine Art sale (lot #0018; estimate: $12,000 – $18,000). This piece comes from a limited edition of 100 published by E. W. Kornfeld of Bern, Switzerland and belongs to the artist’s portfolio titled One Cent Life (1964). The portfolio featured some of the most popular American and European Pop Art lithographs of the 1960s and was assembled by Walasse Ting.

Robert Rauschenberg

One of the leading artists who anticipated Pop Art during the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg was known for his Combines series of paint collages. The artist felt that, to depict the real world accurately, he must incorporate physical items instead of simply painting them. He stepped away from the passion of Abstract Expressionism and helped push the boundaries of New York’s avant-garde art world. Rauschenberg also famously experimented with printmaking and reproducing images from photography and magazines. This practice would come to define his career.

A Pop Art print by Robert Rauschenberg, titled Noname (Elephant), will be available with Dane Fine Art this January (lot #0871; estimate: $5,000 – $7,000). This original, hand-signed lithograph was created between 1973 and 1974 as part of a project honoring American art historian Meyer Schapiro. It belonged to an edition of 100 prints that were initially exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Dane Fine Art’s Luxor Sale of Modern & Contemporary Art will begin on January 26, 2023. Visit Bidsquare to view the complete catalog and register to place a bid. 

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