Nude On Beach

Bringing together unrelated elements, Nude On Beach evokes the aura of uncanniness in a recognisably Surrealist vein. In the works of such artists as Salvador Dali or René Magritte, ordinary elements strike the viewer as bizarre due to their estrangement from contexts, in which they naturally appear. A similar effect is achieved by Lichtenstein as he inserts a slab of Swiss cheese in the top right side of the image. This single element stands out immediately, because it cannot be related to any others within the simplistically rendered beach setting.

In this Surrealist-inspired work, the composition of the female body strikes with its mysteriously distorted quality. What represents the body is, indeed, an abstract form that unfurls across the central part of the image. The Ben-Day dots that became Lichtenstein’s signature pattern after he first used them in the Mirrors series are also present here, filling the peculiar shape of the nude figure.

In a lecture delivered to the members of Inamori Foundation in 1995, Lichtenstein comments on the period of the early 1960s that established him as a leading Pop artist: “I was unable to go back to abstraction, which had been my intention, because this cartoon painting just seemed too demanding”. Nude On Beach represents not only Lichtenstein’s return to abstraction but also the desire to continually reinvent his techniques.