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Lower Manhattan just earned a new pop-art power pose. For a short stint, you can wander past 3 World Trade Center and stumble on a bona fide Roy Lichtenstein in the wild: Brushstrokes, one of the late icon’s most exuberant sculptural works. Think of it as a comic-book swoosh brought to life at skyscraper scale, a piece that looks like it might zip away if you blink too hard.
Lichtenstein spent his career poking fun at the very idea of artistic drama, famously lifting the language of comics, advertising and mass media into the realm of fine art. Here, he takes the primal “heroic” swipe of the paintbrush that Abstract Expressionists worshipped and flips it into something cheeky, polished and impossible to ignore.
Instead of sagely oil on canvas, you get a powder-blue aluminum arc streaked with emerald, yellow and white. Instead of tortured-genius brushwork, you get a playful whoosh of color and contour that seems to hover in mid-air, equal parts sculpture, cartoon and visual prank.
This version of Brushstrokes echoes the paintings he started in the 1960s, when pop art was rattling the art world and Lichtenstein was becoming the guy whose work had critics asking whether he was brilliant or (as one famously put it) “the worst artist in the U.S.” Joke’s on them. Today, he’s canon. His Masterpiece sold for $165 million in 2017. Museums around the world keep his Ben-Day dots glowing. And one of his large-scale works just casually landed among the towers of downtown Manhattan like it always belonged there.
It’s also a neat full-circle moment: Lichtenstein was a lifelong New Yorker, raised on the Upper West Side, trained at the Art Students League and steeped in the city’s cultural noise from jazz clubs to gallery circuits. So yes, this pop swoop feels right at home amid the glass, steel and skyline swagger.
Catch Brushstrokes through November outside 3 WTC. It’s part of the constellation of public art Silverstein Properties has been peppering across the World Trade Center campus, helping turn the neighborhood into a mini-sculpture park. Then, in true Lichtenstein fashion, the piece heads to auction at Sotheby's later this year, ready for one very lucky (and very flush) buyer. Until then, the rest of us get to enjoy it for free.
Pro tip: bring a camera. This is one brushstroke that absolutely pops on your grid.