Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Life with Picasso (1973) is a dazzling intersection of homage and reinvention — a sophisticated dialogue between two of the twentieth century’s most influential artists. Executed in Lichtenstein’s signature Pop idiom, the work reinterprets the Cubist vocabulary of Pablo Picasso through the crisp lens of mechanical precision, flat color fields, and comic-strip stylization. The painting transforms the traditional still-life genre — long cherished in Western art — into a witty meditation on artistic lineage, perception, and reproduction.

Rendered in bold primary colors and outlined in thick black contours, the composition pulsates with clarity and rhythm. Lichtenstein reimagines Picasso’s fragmented planes and overlapping perspectives, distilling them into a visually lucid and playfully ironic design. The familiar Ben-Day dots — Lichtenstein’s emblematic mark — replace painterly texture, emphasizing the mediated nature of modern image-making. The result is a picture that is at once analytical and exuberant: a celebration of modernist form filtered through the cool detachment of Pop Art.

Beneath its apparent simplicity lies a complex conversation about art history. Still Life with Picasso reflects Lichtenstein’s deep respect for Picasso’s innovations, yet it also questions the aura of originality that modernism revered. By translating the expressive distortions of Cubism into the language of mass production, Lichtenstein simultaneously pays tribute to and subverts the modernist master, transforming high art into accessible visual culture.

The 1973 Still Life with Picasso thus stands as a luminous statement on appropriation, artistic inheritance, and the evolution of visual language. It is a work of elegant paradox — reverent and ironic, mechanical and lyrical — a vivid testament to Lichtenstein’s ability to synthesize history and style into an image of enduring clarity and wit.

Created in 1973, 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 90, this work is published by Original Editions, New York.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:

Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Picasso, 1973 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. 127 on pg. 133.
2. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany this work.

About the Framing:

Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Picasso, 1973 is framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, presented in a complementary moulding and finished with silk-wrapped mats and optical grade Plexiglas.