Roy Lichtenstein, Nudes Series

Nudes Series are nine screenprints that Lichtenstein produced in 1994 on the subject of the nude.  The prints were made at Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York and are recorded in the second volume of the catalogue raisonné of the artist's prints (Corlett). As well as using hand-cut stencils to produce his trademark Benday dots in irregularly shaped pieces, Lichtenstein employed computer-generated dye-cut stencils, produced by Swan Engraving, for some of the areas of dots and patterns in these prints. 

In the final years of his life, Lichtenstein took up the theme of the nude - one of the major subjects in the history of visual art - and it became an important part of his late work. As well as series of prints, Lichtenstein made paintings on the subject of the nude, including works such as Nudes with Beach Ball 1994 and Blue Nude 1994. It was the first time that he had approached the subject, but also marked a return to the comic book style of imagery he had first developed in the early 1960s. Rather than working from life, Lichtenstein drew on female figures from the comic books he had first used in the 1960s, removed their clothes and imagined their bare bodies beneath in order to recreate them as nudes. Reproduced as comic-strip heroines, the figures in these works are intentionally provocative, presented to the viewer as a generic object of desire.