Modern Head

A 31-foot blue head, built from flat planes and curves that suggest both a person and a machine, stands outside the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Roy Lichtenstein conceived Modern Head in 1974 as a wooden sculpture painted blue. According to the museum, he produced an edition of four in brushed steel in 1989 and in 1990 painted one of them a vivid blue, making the museum's version a unique work. It belongs to a series he began in the late 1960s exploring human figures that look like machines, and the museum describes its forms as blending the streamlined industrial style of 1930s art deco with references to Picasso and Apollo, the Greek god of the arts. The painted stainless steel measures 372 by 232 by 8 inches.

Its route to Washington was unusual. In 1996 the Public Art Fund of New York City installed it in Battery Park City, one block from the World Trade Center. The museum records that it survived the attacks of 11 September 2001 with only surface scratches and was temporarily used by the FBI as a message board during its investigations. It was removed from the site on 9 November 2001, then shown at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York, and at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida.