NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's announced Roy Lichtenstein's Anxious Girl as a major highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18 during New York's Spring Marquee Week of Sales. Formerly in the collection of art world legends Horace and Holly Solomon, the painting has been held in the same esteemed private collection for more than thirty years and has never before been seen in public. Anxious Girl sits among a rarefied group of paintings that constitute the most prized works in existence by the iconic American artist and stands as an unequivocal masterpiece of the Pop era. It is estimated to realize $40 – 60 million.

Sara Friedlander, Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie's, remarks: “Anxious Girl is a best-in-class example of Roy Lichtenstein, from 1964, the pinnacle of his career. Compositionally, the painting showcases the artist's singular ability to distill complex visual cues into three core elements—line, color, and form—and formally employ them into conveying deep human emotion through timeless love stories and comic book-inspired imagery. Anxious Girl is the quintessential Pop portrait, a veritable icon of twentieth century art and we are delighted to bring it to market this spring at Christie's New York.”

Anxious Girl is among a highly prized group of Lichtenstein's most celebrated works from the 1960s: paintings featuring lovelorn young women inspired by mass-produced comics. The earliest of this group is considered to be The Engagement Ring from 1961—however, the most sophisticated and desirable were made during 1963-1965. Anxious Girl is one of only ten paintings from this short time period that feature an individual woman as the sole subject in a tightly cropped frame, investigating both the psychology and beauty of the female form. The last time a masterpiece painting of the exceptionally rare Girl series came to auction was more than a decade ago; Lichtenstein's Nurse sold at Christie's New York in November 2015 for $95 million and established the current record price for the artist.

Anxious Girl features a young woman with blonde curls, piercing blue eyes, and skin pigmented via a field of Ben-Day dots, a method invented in the late 19th century and made famous by Lichtenstein. In visual style, the dots mimic the mechanical process originally developed to give tonal variation to early newspapers, yet in this work there is no printing or screening involved—each is meticulously applied by the artist's hand. A furrowed brow on her forehead conveys a sense of unease, of questioning. The source material behind the painting is a 1963 comic entitled Too Much to Ask! from DC comic series Girls' Romances, in which the heroine is torn between two male suitors—yet in the original image, she is pictured in between the pair of men, and her forehead interestingly bears no crease.

Anxious Girl was first acquired by Horace and Holly Solomon, important collectors and early champions of Pop Art. Active figures in New York's art scene in the 1960s, the couple's apartment came to be filled with canonical works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claus Oldenburg. In 1966, Holly Solomon commissioned Andy Warhol to produce his now famous 9-paneled portrait of her and in doing so immortalized her reputation as the 'Princess of Pop.' This persona was further developed with more portraits of her by leading artists of the era, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Artschwager, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein—among them, Lichtenstein's masterpiece I...I'm Sorry, featuring a distressed young woman in tears, painted just one year after Anxious Girl. Formerly owned by Ms. Solomon, the 1965 painting now resides in the collection of The Broad in Los Angeles.