Spray Can (from the One Cent Life portfolio)

One Cent Life was an avant-garde 1964 livre d’artiste combining 62 poems by Chinese-American poet Walasse Ting with original lithographs by 28 of the era’s most important Pop and Abstract artists, among them Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Asger Jorn, and Karel Appel. The portfolio was edited by Sam Francis, printed by Maurice Beaudet in Paris, and published by Galerie Kornfeld in Bern in an edition of 2,000.

Spray Can, alongside its companion Girl from the same portfolio, marks Lichtenstein’s first published use of the Ben-Day dot, the mechanical-reproduction halftone screen that would go on to define his graphic vocabulary for the rest of his career. The image depicts a woman’s hand discharging an aerosol can in characteristic Lichtenstein blue against a dotted ground, anticipating the brushstroke and consumer-product imagery that drove his late-1960s output.

Cataloged as Bianchini 3B, Corlett 34, and Mason/Corlett RL 3534, the print is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (intact portfolio), the National Gallery of Art, and the British Museum, among other institutions.