Roy Lichtenstein’s Still life with Mirror, 1972, sold for $6,578,500 at the Contemporary Art Part I sale, 12 May 2011, New York.
A deceptively simple interior scene, Still life with Mirror is composed of a table on which a bowl of fruit, a coffee cup and the verso of a painting sit, construing a foreground. In the background of the image, is an oval mirror to the left on a light blue wall and bound on the upper right by yellow draping cloths. These elements seem mundane and nondescript, “rivaled banality” (D. Waldman “Roy Lichtenstein” Guggenheim Museum, 1993 p. 213). But they are a Lichtenstein Stretcher Frame Painting, a Lichtenstein Oval Mirror and a Lichtenstein Bowl of Fruit, as indicated in the title. They are actual works that Lichtenstein had previously painted, now taking part in an ensemble that itself would become a painting. The representation of these “things” are akin to platonic ideals of a mirror, a table, a curtain, a stretcher frame, a banana, grapefruit, apple, grape, cup and saucer. Reduced to elemental shape, three primary colors of the high modernism of Mondrian are exercised in support of a representational scene that is undermined by it’s own flatness.