Roy Lichtenstein designed this coffee table – and it could be yours

To most, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein will forever be associated with Ben-Day dot patterns, comic strip subjects, and whaams, blams, and pows. But Lichtenstein, who created more than 5,000 artworks in his lifetime, loved to experiment in other mediums, including printmaking, sculpture, film – and, as an auction at Sotheby’s proves, furniture.

Back in the late 1960s, Lichtenstein designed a brass and glass coffee table, one of which is part of an online sale happening now at the global auction house. The sale, which coincides with a blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art opening this week, sheds light on this rare part of the artist’s practice – and also offers collectors the opportunity to seriously level up their living room.

‘Roy really dabbled in everything, and so this auction as a whole really demonstrates his versatility as an artist, his boundary-breaking approach to art making,’ says Keith Lebel, an assistant vice president in Sotheby’s contemporary art department. ‘This table represents an unusual foray into furniture design for him.’

The table is an extension of the Lichtenstein’s ‘Modern’ series, a vibrant body of work created in the 1960s that moved away from comic strip subjects in favour of geometric Art Deco motifs. Like the Modern paintings, the table features energetic shapes, as with its rounded, D-shaped legs and horizontal bands.

While experts don’t know precisely why the artist designed the table, they do know that it was made in an edition of three. Lichtenstein kept it for himself and his wife Dorothy to furnish their home in Southampton, New York. ‘This is an object that they lived with,’ Lebel explains. ‘He thought of it as a sculpture, but it was not this precious item not to be touched. It was certainly used.’

The other tables have equally legendary provenance: one went to legendary gallerist Leo Castelli, who swapped a Dan Flavin artwork for it. Meanwhile, the third went to artist Donald Judd in exchange for a sculpture (it’s since wound up in a private collection). ‘The only people who have ever owned these are just remarkable figures,’ Lebel says.

The Modern table as it’s known is part of two sales drawn from Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s personal collection, one live in New York and one online-only. While the 21-lot live auction features works that will likely fetch in excess of $1 million, the online sale has markedly more accessible works, including the coffee table, which is estimated to fetch between $50,000 and $70,000.

‘I hope that collectors, both seasoned and new, will recognize this work as a really unique opportunity to acquire a work by Lichtenstein that is at once instantly recognizable and unusual,’ Lebel says. ‘It has that sort of old New York Art Deco glam that continues to be really appealing.’

Pow, even.

Selections from Reflections on Pop: Works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein are now on view at Sotheby's Breuer headquarters. 945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA