The Charge 1948 - 1949

Roy Lichtenstein made this unnamed pastel drawing on paper. It's a riot of marks—gestural and kind of awkward. You can see where the artist has gone over areas, building up layers of pastel, smudging and blending, then drawing on top again. I can imagine him wrestling with this image—trying to get it just right, but never quite succeeding, and I wonder what he might have been thinking. There's something so tender about the pastel medium itself. It’s so immediate and tactile. Look at the way he's built up the surface, particularly in the background. The texture and the smudging feel so expressive. He’s best known for his Pop Art paintings based on comic strips, but this feels so different. To me, it seems like it is channeling the work of artists like Paul Klee, who embraced a childlike perspective in their own work. It's like they are having a conversation across time, inspiring one another to explore new ways of seeing and expressing themselves. And isn’t that what art is all about?