Little Landscape 1979

Roy Lichtenstein made this Little Landscape with oil and magna on canvas. He’s boiled down this landscape, this place, to its barest bones. The paint is really flat and clean, so you can see how he’s playing with the oldest themes: land, sky, and that little squiggly line which could be a river. I can imagine Lichtenstein thinking about how to represent a landscape using the fewest marks possible. It feels like such a distillation, like he's stripping away all the unnecessary details to get to the heart of what a landscape really is. The cactus has its own powerful presence, so green and cartoon-like, making the whole scene feel both real and totally artificial. It reminds me of what other artists like Alex Katz were up to – finding a way to make the ordinary iconic. Ultimately, it's a reminder that painting is an ongoing conversation, a way for artists to talk to each other across time and space.