“Sketchbook With Surrealist Girl,’’ features a pair of eyeglasses lying across two open books — one featuring an earlier version of Lichtenstein’s “Girl With Tear’’ and the other sporting a sketch of that image. We get a sense of all the iterations, from commercial reproductions to drawings, that Lichtenstein experimented with. The glasses, a metaphor for the artist’s eye, reference André Kertesz’s famous 1926 photo of Mondrian’s glasses and pipe.
Lambrecht’s own eye falls on sharply composed patterns and arrangements, as in “Pencils,’’ in which several colored pencils, some boxed and others just piled together, lie on sheets of paper covered with diagonal lines. Other items disrupt the retinal buzz, but the piece implies that Lichtenstein’s studio was a world spinning with pattern. The square format of the Hasselblad prints emphasizes the spin, ramping up compositional tension with its symmetry.
Then there’s the layering of photographic reality against Lichtenstein’s graphically stylized vision. In “Roy in Van Gogh’s Bedroom,’’ the artist stands before his own large-scale take of Van Gogh’s famous interior. Lichtenstein’s version of the bedroom’s wooden floor is an eye-popping green wood grain pattern; the walls are covered with his trademark dots and diagonals; the chairs, here half-finished, have been updated to 20th-century modern design. The painting fills most of the frame, pulling the viewer into Lichtenstein’s flattened world, so it’s startling to see Lichtenstein himself, and not a cartoon, standing virtually inside his painted bedroom, with his back to us.
A second show, “From the Studio of Roy Lichtenstein: Photographs by Laurie Lambrecht,’’ opens tomorrow, in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester.
