Several times throughout his career, Lichtenstein expanded his imagery to an architectural scale through murals. In 1983, the artist and a team of assistants painted Greene Street Mural on the back wall of Leo Castelli’s recently opened gallery on Greene Street in SoHo, housed on the ground floor of a spacious former industrial building. The mural functions as a retrospective of Lichtenstein’s image world, gathering motifs that the artist used throughout his career into a continuous composition, albeit one that cannot be viewed in its entirety from a single vantage point.
The hand-painted version on the facing wall represents the fourth time this mural has been presented. The artist’s preparatory drawings, on view nearby, offer insight into how he developed and organized this vast field of signs, while display cases cut into the face of the mural showcase photographs, models, and other materials that demonstrate how Lichtenstein worked through his ideas in three dimensions as well as two. Although the original was intentionally temporary and later destroyed, its repeated re-creation underscores the broad endurance of Lichtenstein’s imagery.
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