A Lichtenstein Study From the Whitney Sets the Tone as New York's Paper Season Returns

IFPDA's Prints & Drawings Month is back, and two of New York's great institutions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library, are among those contributing programs. The image chosen to announce it is a work on paper by Roy Lichtenstein: a 1997 study for a mural at the Bellagio Hotel, *Still Life with Reclining Nude*, made in collage and graphite pencil on board and held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The study shows a large commission at the planning stage, with cut paper and pencil on a board where the composition was worked out before it went up at full scale. For readers who follow the market, the medium is the point. Studies and preparatory sheets let you see how an artist got to the finished work. No price is attached to any of it. The work belongs to a museum, and this desk does not guess at values that are not on the record. What is on the record is that the program has returned, and that the Met and the Morgan are taking part.

With reporting from Surface.