American Art Collaborative

A decade before Roy Lichtenstein emerged as a leading practitioner of Pop art, he focused his gift for irony and caricature on historical American themes, while working in a radically simplified, even childlike, Cubist idiom. Of particular interest to him were nineteenth-century paintings of the American West featuring mythic conflicts between “heroic” pioneers and “savage” Indians. In The Cowboy (Red), Lichtenstein defined this archetypal character by his essential accouterments, including a ten-gallon hat, a boot and spur, a lasso, chaps, and a gun. From the rectangle in the lower half of the composition extends a simplified leg and hoof, suggesting a horse. In this reading of the image, the gun doubles as the horse’s head, seen in profile within the circle of the smiling cowboy’s lasso.