Sotheby's is about to show a side of Roy Lichtenstein that has little to do with comic strips. This October, the auction house presents Reflections on Pop: Works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein — more than 140 pieces the artist and his wife chose to keep for themselves, spanning five decades of paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, prints and ephemera.
The appeal, say Sotheby's specialists, is intimacy. Lichtenstein's finished canvases are famously smooth, engineered to hide the artist's hand. The studies, works on paper and collages in this sale do the opposite: they reveal the discipline and drafting skill behind the polished Pop surfaces. Collages in particular rarely surface at auction, so a grouping this deep is unusual.
The headline lot is Interior with Painting of Nude (Study), a 1997 collage from the late Nudes and Interiors series, estimated at $1m-$1.5m. It packs in many of Lichtenstein's signature motifs at once — the nude, the palette, Ben-day dots and stripes. A related drawing from the same year carries a $100,000-$150,000 estimate. Blue Nude (Study), a coloured pencil and graphite work at $300,000-$400,000, links directly to a major late painting once owned by Gianni Versace. For fans of the classic comic-book era, Reflections on "Nancy" (Study), a 1989 drawing estimated at $150,000-$200,000, circles back to the imagery that made him famous.
The sale also pushes well beyond Pop's clichés. Entablature, a 1976 canvas at $700,000-$1m, comes from a series that traded comic panels for architectural ornament, while Glass II (Prototype), a painted wood piece from the same year estimated at $300,000-$500,000, takes his visual language into three dimensions. Sotheby's says the market backs the ambition: its 2024 and 2025 sales from the Lichtenstein collection were 99 percent sold.
The logistics: a 23-lot live auction on October 7 in New York, plus an online sale of over 120 works open for bidding from September 25 to October 9. Timing is good for anyone in the city that week — the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its own Lichtenstein exhibition, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, just days after the auctions close, so a single New York trip can cover both the market and the museum view of the artist.
Who should care: collectors and art lovers, certainly, but also anyone planning a cultural city break in New York this autumn. The online sale is free to browse and bid on, making it an accessible way to engage with a major art moment even if the seven-figure lots stay out of reach.
