Arts on the Point Adds Lichtenstein's Brushstroke Group

On January 3 UMass Boston installed Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke Group, a major new addition to the University’s acclaimed public sculpture park Arts on the Point, which features a distinguished collection of works by internationally renowned artists.

Made of aluminum and brightly painted, Brushstroke Group comes to the University on long term loan from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, established by the artist prior to his death ten years ago. The sculpture’s loan to the campus was arranged by Professor Paul Hayes Tucker, the university’s Distinguished Professor of Art and director of Arts on the Point.

Brushstroke Group is installed at the base of the oval leading up to the Campus Center. It consists of five energized forms that appear as if the artist had taken a richly loaded paint brush and stroked it across the sky. Witty, accessible, and visually arresting, Brushstroke Group looks back to the Impressionists who isolated and triumphed the individual brushstroke just as it reaches across the bay to Sister Corita’s famously painted gas tank. Like Mark di Suvero’s steel Huru at the entrance to UMass Boston, Brushstroke Group affirms the importance of creativity and the value of experimentation.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was one of the founding fathers of American Pop Art which emerged in New York in the 1960s. He is perhaps best known as a painter who produced pictures of distinctly American subjects often drawn from comic books and popular illustrations. But he also made sculpture during his long and productive career, turning to monumental work like Brushstroke Group in the last years of his life.

Born in Manhattan, Lichtenstein attended the Ohio State University where he earned his BA and MFA. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, returning to teach at his alma mater for several years before moving back to New York in 1960. He had his first one-person exhibition of his coolly detached paintings at the celebrated Leo Castelli Gallery in Soho in 1962. Rendered in what seemed to be a mechanical style, frequently with the Benday dots of commercial printing, his simple, easily readable canvases were an antidote to the heavily worked, emotionally laden ones of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning, who is represented at UMass Boston by his Reclining Figure behind Quinn. Lichtenstein’s first exhibition was a huge success and brought him instant fame.

The subject of brush stokes preoccupied Lichtenstein throughout his career. He explored it in every medium—drawings, prints, collages, paintings, and sculptures. He was fascinated by the subject because it was a painter’s defining mark and was laden with literal and symbolic power.