Tire by Roy Lichtenstein in the Museum of Modern Art, December 2007

Roy Lichtenstein. (American, 1923-1997). Tire. 1962. Oil on canvas, 68 x 58" (172.7 x 147.3 cm). Fractional gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald G. Fisher in honor of Kirk Varnedoe

Gallery label text
2007

In the early 1960s Lichtenstein found a rich source of imagery in advertisements and comic strips. Reacting against the introspection of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, he adopted the vocabulary of American consumer and popular culture and the impersonal look of mechanical reproduction. Tire is one of the artists many early black–and–white, single–object paintings of an ordinary commercial product. The prosaic tire, magnified, takes on the emblematic authority of an icon. Formally, the paintings impact depends on the complex interplay between the graphically rendered realism of a generic industrial object and the geometric form of the tire suspended in a void.

Text from: www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=82377