Provenance

Bess Cutler Gallery, New York
Private collection, Alpine, NJ (Acquired from above, 1988)
Exhibitions
Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, Sturtevant Drawings, 1988-1965, October 22–November 16, 1988. Christie's, New York, Earthly Paradise: Meditations on Nature and the Joy of Life in 20th and 21st century Art, July 10–August 31, 2023.
Casey Kaplan, New York, This Isn’t Who It Would Be, If It Wasn’t Who It Is, January 12–February 17, 2024.
Literature
Sturtevant Drawings, 1988-1965 (New York: Bess Cutler Gallery, 1988), n.p., ill.

Description
Sturtevant (1924-2014), whose real name was Elaine Frances Sturtevant, gained recognition for her striking appropriations of major works by her male peers. She was one of the first artists to
problematize issues of originality and authorship against the backdrop of modern art’s enshrinement of the artist’s––and the artwork’s––unique aura. “Study for Lichtenstein Figures with Sunset” is an inimitable and rare example of Sturtevant’s unmatched ability to reproduce not just an artwork but also a style. Based on Roy Lichtenstein’s “Figures with Sunset” (1978) which itself is interestingly part of Lichtenstein’s two-decade study of “reinterpreting great works of modern art in a Pop Art style” and is currently housed in the collection of SFMOMA, Sturtevant’s work was created ten years after in 1988. It urges us to contemplate more critically the fraught issue of originality and our very notions of what constitutes artistic “creation.”
Though “Study for Lichtenstein Figures with Sunset” looks at first glance to be a reproduction of Lichtenstein’s work, Sturtevant deviated in a few ways so as to maintain some discernable difference, including the decision to shade using crosshatching rather than Lichtenstein’s hallmark Ben-Day dots. In addition, using the materials of graphite, colored pencil, and collage rather than oil paint (the medium of choice for Lichtenstein’s work) allowed Sturtevant to achieve a more textured finish than the mechanically produced look of Lichtenstein’s original work.
Throughout her life, Sturtevant cultivated friendships with many notable artists, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who gave Sturtevant one of his silkscreens so that she could produce her own versions in 1969. After initially focusing her reproductions on works by American artists such as Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, she expanded to the works of Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Anselm Kiefer in the early 1980s, often mastering new mediums to reproduce works. In most cases, her decision to copy this latter group of younger artists completely presaged these artists’ recognition.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2015), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014), Serpentine Galleries (2013), Kunsthalle Zurich (2012), Moderna Museet (2012), La Biennale di Venezia (2011), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010), Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2004), Villa Arson, Nice (1993), among others.