See Roy Lichtenstein’s Sculpture as Remembered by Irving Blum

“I looked hard at those cartoons. They somehow seemed more finished than Andy’s paintings. But I remember distinctly making a connection, with the heavy black outline . . . I thought that there was something going on that I could either participate in—or not.”—Irving Blum, in a 2012 Q&A for Interview Magazine with Peter Brant.

Blum, celebrated contemporary art dealer and one-time director of the Ferus Gallery, ultimately did decide to participate in the making of Roy Lichtenstein’s career, along with those of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman and John Altoon. “It was something Roy Lichtenstein never forgot, that early support. He was very appreciative,” he continued.

In a 1976 recorded interview session, Blum told his interviewer that he gravitated toward Lichtenstein in particular because his (along with Warhol’s) aesthestic came closest to his own. His first Los Angeles Lichtenstein show in 1963 heralded the then unnamed Pop movement and reactions were mixed on the West Coast.

“The artists were amused by the work; they were a little bewildered by it, as were artists all over the country, I think,” Blum said in a 1978 continuation of the interview. “They saw it as being authentic but somehow different from anything they’d ever experienced, curious, and they were, I think, overall unsure in their reaction.”

Now Gagosian is holding a gallery show dedicated to Lichtenstein’s sculptural works and related studies curated by none other than Blum. It will be the first Gagosian exhibition of the artist’s sculptures in almost twenty years and was organized in close collaboration with the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein in recognition of the centenary of his birth.

It’s not particularly surprising that ‘Did Roy Lichtenstein make sculptures?’ is a relatively common Google query. The artist, who experimented with genres throughout his career, is probably best known for his paintings of comic book panels, complete with hard edges and Ben-Day dots, in which he stayed close—many would say too close—to his primary source material. His sculpture took the motifs he used in his paintings and applied it to three-dimensional forms, creating something that’s both flat and then again not in the process.

“Though obviously sculptural in the common meaning of the term, heavy wrought objects freestanding in space,” writes Adam Gopnik in the exhibition’s catalogue, “these works are more optical than tactile—planar and pictorial, more than ‘haptic’ and three-dimensional, more like crystallized drawings than like full-bodied sculpture. They invite us to look through them, rather than to walk around them.”

Lichtenstein Remembered will presumably let Blum showcase the artist’s ability to create what the gallery calls “drawings in space” representing everyday objects, people and concepts in the multidisciplinary Pop art style the artist helped popularize in the 1960s and beyond. The sculptures and studies in the show will be accompanied by documentary and contextual photographs with quotations from artists, collectors, curators, gallerists and friends about Lichtenstein and his uniquely witty work.

Lichtenstein Remembered opens at 980 Madison Avenue on September 9.