United Plaza
South 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia has a wonderful program called Museum Without Walls, and this is part of that program.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke Group, was brought to Philadelphia in August 2005 courtesy of Duane Morris L.L.P, one of the city’s largest law firms, which occupies the adjacent building.
In an unusual arrangement, the sculpture is on loan to Duane Morris from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. The Fairmount Park Art Association and the Philadelphia Museum of Art worked with the law firm and the Foundation to bring the sculpture to the city.
It is part of the Brushstrokes series of artworks that includes several paintings and sculptures whose subject is the actions made with a house-painter’s brush. The series was part of Lichtenstein’s 1960s slant towards reductive, economical work.
Roy Lichtenstein, born in 1923 in New York City, was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, he went on to create a body of work consisting of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.
