Dieter Roth. Untitled from 6 Piccadillies. 1970
Double sided screenprint over offset lithograph, 19 1/8 x 27 3/16" (48.6 x 69 cm). Publisher: Petersburg Press, London. Printer: Staib & Mayer, Stuttgart, and H. P. Haas, Korntal. Edition: 150. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Photograph: MoMA Imaging Services. © 2013 Estate of Dieter Roth
In the late 1960s, Rita Donagh, wife of Roth’s longtime friend and collaborator Richard Hamilton, gave the artist a postcard of London’s famous Piccadilly Circus. This unremarkable image became the basis for one of the artist’s best-known series of artworks, 6 Piccadillies. Roth enlarged and reproduced the image as a double-sided photolithograph then transformed it through various interventions: overprinting it in Day-Glo colors, submerging it in a fog of translucent white, and almost completely erasing it with a layer of iron filings. The portfolio cover resembles a suitcase, an item that had a constant presence in Roth’s itinerant life. 96 Piccadillies, a later volume also in this exhibition, reproduces the artist’s paintings on postcards picturing the same landmark; the reproductions themselves can be separated and sent as postcards.