In the 1990s, Roy Liechtenstein created a body of work called Interiors, in which he mixed references to classical antiquity, the renaissance, and modernism. He also used visual signs plucked from his own illustrious career, such as his characteristic Ben-Day dots . Created in the last year of Lichtenstein‘s life, this drawing is a study for a painting, Interior with Ajax (1997), commissioned by the fashion designer Gianni Versace. In it, a confused looking Ajax, a hero of Greek mythology, finds himself in an an eclectically decorated room in which styles float free of their contexts and hatch marks are divorced from their descriptive function.
Photographed in the Morgan Library in Manhattan.