Within Roy Lichtenstein’s graphic oeuvre, his 1990s works rank among the most technically sophisticated of his career. “Two Nudes” is a masterful example of the artist’s celebrated late series “Nudes”. Begun shortly after his highly acclaimed retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1993, the series also foreshadowed the “Late Nudes”, which constituted his final group of paintings before Lichtenstein’s death in 1997. In the spring of 1993, Lichtenstein began developing collages for the “Nudes” series in his New York studio. In December of that same year, he personally cut the Rubylith stencils for the relief printing plates of each motif, and in February 1994, he visited Tyler Graphics in Mount Kisco, New York, to begin implementing the project. As with many of his motifs, dating back to the early 1960s, Lichtenstein drew inspiration from comic-strip imagery, taking existing compositions and transforming them through his unmistakable artistic style. “Two Nudes” draws on characters from the “Girls’ Romances” comic series by DC Comics, which Lichtenstein had already used for iconic 1960s paintings such as “In the Car” (1963) and “Sleeping Girl” (1964). These earlier works often focus on female protagonists in moments of romantic tension or heartbreak. In the “Nudes” series, however, Lichtenstein radically reinvents his archetypal female figure: he strips her bare, thereby drawing on the tradition of the female nude as well as the idealized muses of Western art history. In his most striking iconography, the composition depicts two women, one crying while the other comforts her. Beyond the female motif, the work references earlier works, including the silkscreen print “Mirror” (1990) and the acrylic painting “Interior with Red Wall” (1991). Creating this print requires outstanding technical mastery and benefits greatly from Lichtenstein’s long-standing collaboration with the renowned printer and publisher Kenneth Tyler, with whom he produced his first joint prints at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles as early as 1969. Using large-format stencils, the artist cuts out his motifs with extreme precision. In contrast to earlier phases of his career, he uses his characteristic Ben-Day dots to shade in dialogue with precisely calculated, flat color fields. Three years before his death, Roy Lichtenstein achieved a virtuoso compositional layering and a complex, self-referential narrative with “Two Nudes”, presenting himself at the height of his creative maturity and mastery. [KA]