![Roy Lichtenstein - Puzzled Portrait [1978] by Gandalf's Gallery](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5512/12130766753_80fc09361e.jpg)
Puzzled Portrait from 1978 is a testament to Roy Lichtenstein’s enduring engagement with the nature of art in the contemporary era, both as a major figure in the American Pop Art movement and as a painter who explored the art of the past in order to elevate the art of his times. In the 1960s, Lichtenstein garnered fame for his appropriations of comics, advertising and other forms of ‘low’ art, placing them into the ‘high’ art context of the gallery and museum. In these prototypical Pop Art masterpieces, Lichtenstein reproduced the language of graphic and commercial art with his use of bold outlines and vivid colours to depict form in a flattened picture plane. This unique style, utilised in the service of depicting common-place figures and objects, was the beginning of his ultimate subject: art about art. Avant-garde and modernist movements earlier in the century had decried traditional genres such as nudes and still-lifes. Yet as the decades passed, the dialectic between the subjects of art and the techniques of art persisted and was nowhere more thoroughly explored than in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre. In a continuous aesthetic dialogue with the pre-war generation of European masters, he made use of past genres to produce innovative and radical contemporary art.
[Sotheby’s Auctions - Oil and magna on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm]