Roto Broil
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''Roto Broil'' is a 1961 pop art painting by
Roy Lichtenstein Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. ...
. It was one of the consumer goods paintings made in the early 1960s that "made a splash, sold well and immediately polarized the critics."


History

The subject of ''Roto Broil'' comes from a packaging carton. When Lichtenstein had his first solo show at The Leo Castelli Gallery in February 1962, it sold out before opening. ''Roto Broil'' was one of the works that Lichtenstein exhibited at that show. The work was acquired at
Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...
, New York on October 21, 1976 for $ 75,000 USD


Details

''Roto Broil'' is part of a 1961 trilogy of common commercial goods (along with ''Electric Cord'' and ''Turkey'') that are considered his first "full-fledged images". They are reduce the narrative and highlight the "purely representational and explanatory value". This begins a period in which he presents bright objects in space for perusal. It was among the pop works that "...shocked viewers with their confrontational banality..." Drawn from advertising, ''Roto Broil'' represents Lichtenstein's talent for depicting his source material in "unified, powerful and coherent formal structures" without his audience losing its connection to the source, while physically and powerfully expressing the key elements of his art — "colour, line, form, composition and so on." According to ''Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism'',
the appliance itself, placed symmetrically against a uniform field of red, is treated in terms of bold simplified masses of black and white. Particularly striking is the rendering of the drainage holes in the frying-pan as black discs which take on a life of their own in the same way as they would in a completely abstract painting…The symmetry of the composition is calculatedly broken by the black lines (paradoxically indicating highlights) on the right side of the appliance and by the protruding handle of the pan on the same side.
''Roto Broil'' presents its subject in its entirety with no distracting objects, but with no supporting
planar surface In mathematics, a plane is a Euclidean ( flat), two-dimensional surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point (zero dimensions), a line (one dimension) and three-dimensional space. Planes can arise as ...
. Thus, "It occupies the picture-plane emblematically, centralized and head-on." The "frontal and centralized presentation"'s directness lacked the sophistication to market the images of household goods for advertising but was considered daring artistically.


See also

*
1961 in art Events from the year 1961 in art. Events * January 5 – Italian sculptor Alfredo Fioravanti goes to the United States consulate in Rome to confess that he was part of the team that forged the Etruscan terracotta warriors in the Metropolitan M ...


Notes


References

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External links


Lichtenstein Foundation website
{{Roy Lichtenstein 1961 paintings Paintings by Roy Lichtenstein