Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Life with Crystal Bowl (1976) is a masterful orchestration of clarity, reflection, and artifice — a meditation on perception and materiality that transforms the humble still life into a dazzling stage of formal invention. Executed in his unmistakable Pop vernacular, this work reimagines one of art history’s oldest genres through the lens of modern industrial precision, where the coolness of line and pattern becomes a new kind of lyricism.

At first glance, the composition appears serenely balanced: a crystal bowl, gleaming with geometric transparency, anchors the scene. Yet beneath this order lies a complex interplay of light, refraction, and illusion. Lichtenstein’s disciplined use of Ben-Day dots, diagonal hatching, and hard-edged contours creates the optical sensation of glass and reflection without ever relinquishing the flatness of the painted surface. The crystalline vessel, though depicted in rigid schematic form, seems to shimmer with vitality — its interior and exterior folding into one another through the artist’s calculated use of abstraction and pattern.

The still life elements — fruit, vessel, surface — recall the classical arrangements of Cézanne, Braque, and Picasso, but Lichtenstein replaces their tactile brushwork with the detached perfection of mechanical reproduction. Here, color becomes structure: electric yellows and reds pulse against zones of cool blue and white, the entire image vibrating with a visual tension between the illusion of depth and the insistence of the plane. The traditional intimacy of a still life is thus reinterpreted as a sleek, modern tableau — luminous, immaculate, and self-aware.

Beneath the stylization, Still Life with Crystal Bowl reveals Lichtenstein’s enduring fascination with how we perceive and construct reality. The crystal bowl — a vessel designed to hold and refract — becomes a metaphor for vision itself, an emblem of the artist’s ability to transform light, transparency, and reflection into the language of abstraction. Every mark is deliberate, every surface reflective of both object and observer.

In this work, Lichtenstein fuses the rigor of Cubism with the cool detachment of Pop, arriving at a composition that is at once analytical and sensual, impersonal yet poetic. The result is an image that shimmers between representation and idea — a still life not of objects, but of perception itself: brilliant, crystalline, and eternally modern.

Created in 1976, this Lichtenstein pop art screenprint in colors is hand-signed by Roy Lichtenstein (New York, 1923 – New York, 1997) in pencil: ‘rf Lichtenstein’.  Numbered from the edition of 45, this work is published by Original Editions, New York.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:

Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Crystal Bowl, 1976 is fully documented and referenced in the below catalogue raisonnés and texts (copies will be enclosed as added documentation with the invoices that will accompany the final sale of the work).

1. Corlett, Lee Mary. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein A Catalogue Raisonee 1948-1997. Hudson Hills Press: New York, 1994. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 150 on pg. 149.
2. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany this work.

About the Framing:

Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Crystal Bowl, 1976 is framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, presented in a complementary moulding and finished with silk-wrapped mats and optical grade Plexiglas.