An artist whose work imitates dot printing, which makes the usual loupe test read backwards.
New York4 weighted checks
Lichtenstein is the one artist in this room where the standard reproduction test misleads, because his imagery deliberately imitates the Ben-Day dots of commercial printing. A loupe finds dots on a genuine Lichtenstein because the dots are the artwork.
The distinction is therefore between dots that were printed as part of a screenprint's flat ink layers — hand-drawn or hand-separated, at the artist's chosen scale — and dots that are the halftone rosette of a photomechanical reproduction. They look different at magnification once you know what you are separating.
The Corlett catalogue raisonné documents the prints. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation ceased issuing authentication opinions, so as with Warhol the catalogue and provenance carry the argument.
The Corlett catalogue raisonné of Lichtenstein's prints records edition sizes, publishers, printers, papers and dimensions for each image. It is the reference the market uses.
The artist's Ben-Day dots are part of the image and are laid as flat screenprinted colour. Under magnification they are even, opaque and at a consistent scale that the artist chose. A halftone rosette from photomechanical reproduction is finer, angled in overlapping screens, and produces colour by optical mixing rather than by flat opaque layers.
The Foundation no longer issues authentication opinions, so catalogue matching and provenance are the working method.
Ordered by how much each one settles. The decisive checks are the ones worth your first five minutes; the supporting ones only matter once those are clean.
Lichtenstein's dots are flat, opaque, evenly sized and at the scale the artist chose — part of the printed image. A photomechanical reproduction shows a much finer halftone rosette with overlapping angled screens. Separating the two is the essential skill in this market and it is learnable in one side-by-side comparison.
Edition, publisher, printer, paper and dimensions should agree with the Corlett entry. Edition size is the commonest failure.
Pencil signature sitting on the paper's surface, handwritten edition fraction, in the convention the catalogue records for that edition.
The Foundation ceased issuing opinions, so gallery records, exhibition history and an unbroken ownership chain do the work a certificate would elsewhere.
Lovenhall ArtThe checks tell you how it was made. The instrument tells you what it appears to be, and roughly what its kind fetches.