A 31-foot-tall, 13,000-pound visitor arrived in the District last week when the Smithsonian American Art Museum installed venerated pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental sculpture “Modern Head” at the corner of Ninth and F Streets NW. Elizabeth Broun, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of SAAM, is excited about the new arrival.
“We love it because It has all the verve of art deco; all the streamlined, thrusting diagonals,” she says. “It’s got a lot of humor — the little wing that comes off the top is very jaunty. We especially love the way it relates to our building: We have this noble, neoclassical building with beautiful horizontals and verticals in marble. But the sculpture is diagonal and surging and blue. It’s a great interplay.”
Lichtenstein, who died in 1997, built his first prototype for “Modern Head” — an iconographic representation of man in an increasingly industrialized, technological society — out of blue-painted wood in 1974. Fifteen years later, he made an edition of four steel versions of the piece. He painted one of the series blue in 1990, and that’s the sculpture that’ll be standing watch outside of SAAM for the next six months. It once resided near the World Trade Center, weathering the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with only superficial damage. Rescue workers even used “Modern Head” as a makeshift message board in the days following the tragedy.
(If you go: “Modern Head” (outside) the Smithsonian American Art Museum; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; Ninth and F Streets NW; free; 202-633-1000; americanart.si.edu)
