NEW YORK, NY.- On July 10, ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century will be highlighted by Roy Lichtenstein’s monumentally scaled, Nude with Joyous Painting (estimate in the region of $30 million). Painted in 1994 and belonging to an important private American collection, Nude with Joyous Painting is a tour-de-force of Lichtenstein’s consummate series of nudes that are acclaimed as the summation of his late career. The Nudes mark Lichtenstein’s return to the comic-book heroines that propelled him to fame in the early 1960s and together, they rank among his most significant bodies of work. Culled from his prodigious archive of vintage comics, the Nudes marry Lichtenstein’s Pop Art sensibility with the most storied subject in the history of Western art—the female nude. “The later women paintings and nudes that Roy did are just absolutely gorgeous,” the artist Jeff Koons has affirmed, “in terms of beauty and engaging imagery--interesting, viral imagery---the women are fantastic.” This sale will mark Nude with Joyous Painting’s auction debut.

Ana Maria Celis, Head of Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “Nude with Joyous Painting is an iconic example of Lichtenstein’s series of Nudes. This tour-de-force of Pop Art marks his return to the comic book heroines that launched his career in the early 60s. In this work, the beautiful heroine is caught in dramatic moment of suspense in stark contrast to a jubilant interior scene.”

The present work joins the ranks of the most important examples of Lichtenstein’s Nudes that have been offered at auction. Christie’s leads the market for this iconic motif, having sold the artist’s top two most expensive nudes, including Seductive Girl, 1996 for $31.5 million in 2013, and Nude with Red Shirt, 1995, for $28 million in 2012.

Shortly after it was painted, Nude with Joyous Painting was debuted at Leo Castelli’s SoHo gallery in November of 1994. There, it was included in a group of seven breakthrough large-scale nude paintings, several of which are in major American public collections, including Nude at Vanity, 1994 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection) and Nude with Pyramid, 1994 (The Broad, Los Angeles).

As a series, the Nudes were the first body of work that Lichtenstein undertook following his extensive Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum retrospective in New York in 1993. The series has been described as “formally groundbreaking” by the curator of Lichtenstein’s 2012 retrospective organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, Sheena Wagstaff, who characterized them as “monumental celebrations of domesticated eroticism.”

A painting fraught with melodrama and suggestive narratives, Nude with Joyous Painting rivals that of even the earlier 1960s comic-book paintings. Its formal structure, visual simplicity and zoomed-in, close-up cropping is very much aligned with the earlier ‘60s Girl paintings. One important element differentiates this group of Nudes from their ‘60s predecessors however. As the curator Avis Berman has observed, their handsome leading man is notably absent. "The 1990s nudes take pleasure in their own company, without the slightest hint of needing or missing a man,” Berman explained. “In contrast to Lichtenstein's original romance-comic pictures, this world flourishes exuberantly without men or engagement rings or kisses.”

On the occasion of Lichtenstein’s solo show at Leo Castelli in late 1994—in what proved to be one of his last exhibits before his untimely death in 1997—the New York Daily News declared: “The king of the blown-up comic-book frame had seemed to be settling into a quiet, Old Masterly period of late—but he’s broken out with a bang with his new series of nudes.” Indeed, Lichtenstein’s culminating series of Nudes rank among his greatest, most complex bodies of work. As an artist who ceaselessly innovated while staying true to his signature style, Lichtenstein’s Nudes reveal ingenious new formal devices—especially his new form of Ben-Day dots, a rich array of new color and “quoting” of previous work. More than just an erotic pin-up, they are rich with art historical references and cleverly-veiled allusions to the act of looking itself.