Roy Lichtenstein is usually thought of as the great Pop artist of the comic strip. But there was another Lichtenstein – the obsessive experimenter – that an upcoming Sotheby’s auction is offering a closer look at.
Reflections on Pop: Works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein will bring together more than 140 works from the personal collection that Lichtenstein and his wife, Dorothy, chose to keep. It will span five decades and mediums including paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, prints, editions, and ephemera.
“The story of this collection overall is innately personal; these are the works Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein held back for their personal collection,” Haleigh Stoddard, Sotheby’s head of contemporary curated tells Elite Traveler.
“Collectors interested in Lichtenstein’s work are drawn to his iconic images as well as works that show his creative process. There are many collectors who collect his work in depth and collect extensively across mediums, embracing not only masterpieces but also preparatory works that provide a deeper understanding of his process, draughtsmanship, and artistic innovation,” she adds.
The works on paper and collages allow the viewer to see the artist’s hand at work. “Many of Lichtenstein’s paintings on canvas are tightly rendered to hide the hand of the artist, which is a central theme across Pop Art,” Keith Lebel, Sotheby’s gead of contemporary discoveries tells Elite Traveler.
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“What is so appealing about seeing so many of his works on paper, collages, and drawings together in these auctions is that you get a real sense of Lichtenstein as a draughtsman and an intimate look at his process. The collages throughout the sales are quite fascinating – they don’t come up as often at auction as his drawings, prints, or paintings. The fact that you can see so much of his working process is rare to this selection of works.”
Lichtenstein spent much of his career making art that looked quite impersonal, yet the closer you get to the studies and collages up for auction, the more obviously they reveal a very human process. This is “most apparent across the collages, which show how disciplined he was and how carefully he conceived of his compositions,” says Stoddard.
One of the stars of the sale is Interior with Painting of Nude (Study), a 1997 collage estimated at $1m-$1.5m. There’s also a drawing of the same title, executed in the same year and estimated at $100,000-$150,000. The work belongs to Lichtenstein’s late Nudes and Interiors series from the final decade of his career.
Speaking about the collage, Stoddard says that “it encapsulates so many of Lichtenstein’s key motifs: the nude, the artist’s palette, his iconic Ben-day dots, and stripes. Throughout his work, Lichtenstein reimagined art historical genres such as the nude or the landscape and translated these genres into his Pop aesthetic. In this work, you have nearly all in one composition.”
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Lebel sees something else in the picture: “Like so many of his works, this picture is art about art – it is made to describe and showcase what it’s like to be an artist. I love how this work depicts the palette and brushes.”
Another piece, Blue Nude (Study), is estimated at $300,000-$400,000. The colored pencil and graphite drawing relates directly to Blue Nude, one of Lichtenstein’s best-known late Nudes and formerly part of Gianni Versace’s collection before selling at Sotheby’s in 2005. There is also Reflections on “Nancy” (Study), a 1989 drawing estimated at $150,000-$200,000, which returns to the comic-strip imagery for which Lichtenstein is best known.
“Given these two auctions feature more than 140 works, the group covers many more subjects than just comic books,” says Stoddard. “The online sale presents abstraction, still life, works from the modern art series which are art deco motifs, as well as his classic brushstroke motif, works about music and art history. The sales demonstrate that while the comic book imagery was extremely influential, his scope and vision went well beyond just one source of inspiration.”
One such example is Entablature, a 1976 canvas estimated at $700,000-$1 million. Part of Lichtenstein’s Entablatures series, the work marked a departure from comic strips and advertising imagery. Elsewhere, Glass II (Prototype), a painted wood work from 1976 estimated at $300,000-$500,000, shows Lichtenstein moving his Pop vocabulary into three dimensions.
“The market for Lichtenstein’s work is incredibly strong and robust, as demonstrated by the success of works from the collection that have come to auction at Sotheby’s the last two years,” Stoddard reveals. Sotheby’s sales of works from the collection in 2024 and 2025 were 99 percent sold. This October’s offering in New York is considerably larger, split between a 23-lot live auction on October 7 and an online sale of more than 120 works, open for bidding from September 25 to October 9.
The auctions also coincide with renewed institutional attention on Lichtenstein, with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opening just days after the Sotheby’s sales. “We hope that collectors come away with a deeper appreciation for the breadth of Lichtenstein’s practice, and the range of mediums that he explored,” says Stoddard.
“These studies are not just preparatory works, but they are art works in their own right. Lichtenstein found the collaged drawings and prints to be just as important as the large paintings,” adds Lebel.
