Roy Lichtenstein, United States, 1923-1997

Modular Painting in Four Panels V, 1969

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City. A leader of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, he is most widely know for his paintings based on the magnification of details from commercial advertising and comic strips. Modular Painting in Four Panels V is part of a series from the late 1960s inspired by Art Moderne design of the 1930s in which the artist has combined the progressive repetition of geometric abstraction with hard-edged line and color. According to Lichtenstein, the division of the work into four parts derives from an elementary school drawing project in which he divided his working surface into four sections and repeated the drawing in each quadrant. The use of strong, primary colors plus black and white distinctly characterizes much of Lichtenstein’s work, as does his enlargement of the Benday dots that constitute the images in comic strips and other printed visual materials. These techniques enliven the flat surface of the paintings.

Frank Stella, United States, b. 1936

Le Neveu de Rameau, 1974

Frank Stella's rejection of the expressive brushwork and rich palette of the Abstract Expressionists who preceded him is evident in this work from the series entitled Diderot, after the French encyclopedist and critic. In these huge geometric variations on his earlier, smaller, Concentric Squares, Stella favored a neutral, controlled imagery that derives its composition and content from the shape of the canvas. The painting owes its visual excitement to the conflict between the extravagance of its size and the simplicity of the concentric bands of color, which reflect the depth of the stretcher. Stella repeatedly used the pictorial rectangle, appreciating it for what he considered its consistent power and strength.

Duane Hanson, United States, 1925-1996

Football Player, 1981

Duane Hanson, the son of a Minnesota dairy farmer, was trained in sculpture at the Cranbrook Aacademy in Michigan. He arrived at his now familiar technique of casting in polyvinyl resins reinforced with fiberglass in the mid-1960's. Hanson cast his uncanny, hyperrealist figures from live models, using partial body molds, which he assembled and adjusted until the figure matched his conception. For Football Player, his model was a South Florida sculptor, Robert Thiele, who was also a professional athlete. Creating Football Player, with its meticulous details of skin and hair, took Hanson about five months. Hanson saw himself not as a maker of shockingly realistic effigies but as a keen social observer, a creator of types as telling as those of Balzac, and a documenter of his time.

Deborah Butterfield, United States, b. 1949

Rex, 1991

Deborah Butterfield has devoted her career to producing expressive sculptural representations of horses in various media, including clay, mud and sticks, scrap metal, steel, and bronze. Rex, which is constructed of orange-colored steel strips, is a portrait of one of the artist's favorite horses. Butterfield was born and trained in California. She began sculpting horses in the early 1970s, creating realistic works in plaster. Several years later, having tired of realism, she turned to the unlikely medium of mud and sticks. She later abandoned natural materials and hands-on modeling for found steel, iron, and painted metal scraps, which she partially reshapes through a process that includes welding, cutting, and hammering.