Explore the Background of this artwork.
Portrait of Madame Cézanne was exhibited along with works such as Man with Folded Arms at Lichtentein's first Pop exhibition in Los Angeles. The linear twice-removed black-and-white (along with Man with Folded Arms) is regarded as a quotation of Erle Loran's outline diagram of Cézanne's compositional methods published in a diagram book called Cézanne's Composition. The book was popular in the academic community. Loran's representation in a "harsh black outline" depicted the axes of the composition without representing the "texture and expressiveness of Cézanne's original." In fact, Loran stated that "this diagrammatic approach may seem coldly analytical to those who like vagueness and poetry in art criticism." Loran's diagrammatic techniques were standard at the time; redrawn outlines of the figure were illustrated with alphabetized arrows to identify areas and directions. The diagram highlighted body part positioning without studying the painted surface.According to John Coplans's Roy Lichtenstein, the artist was fascinated by the drawings: "isolating the woman out of the context of the painting seemed to Lichtenstein to be such an oversimplification of a complex issue as to be ironical in itself"; the oversimplification referred to was Loran's representing Cézanne's work with nothing more than black lines. The work marked the first of Lichtenstein's "artistic appropriations of the canonical works of Modernism" that resulted from his realization of the interrelation "between avant-garde and kitsch".
oversimplification John Coplans Roy Lichtenstein Erle Loran's Cézanne Erle Loran