Lichtenstein Swiss Cheese Doors Escaped Containment

a slightly sassy thin older white guy in a dress shirt and jeans does a classic contraposto in the gap between slightly open freight elevator doors painted bright yellow, with black and white holes, a cartoonish rendition of swiss cheese. the wall around them is painted a deep royal blue, a matched steel security bar leans against the right wall, which has a section painted black-on-white benday dots, because this is roy lichtenstein in his studio
Roy Lichtenstein posing with his Swiss Cheese freight elevator doors to his loft studio, which appears to be just part of the whole Lichtensteinworld painting scheme.

Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.

a petite white woman in a fanciful red and white printed coat took a selfie in the polished bronze double doors designed by roy lichtenstein to look like swiss cheese at the limestone entry vestibuile of the knapps' 1990s mansion in bel air california. a giant lichtenstein brush totem is reflected behind her, in the center of the mansion's motor court, and behind that, a thick grove of trees. the roy lichtenstein foundation owns the rights to this image and, now that i've posted it without their express written permission, my firstborn child ig
I traded the rights to everything I’ve ever written and my firstborn to the Lichtenstein Foundation so that I could properly celebrate Swiss Cheese Day by illustrating the existential reckoning Roy Lichtenstein left behind with these polished brass and glass doors (1993)

But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.

After another artist praised them, I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.

a deceptively intimate village like entrance facade to a 15000 square foot mega mansion made of dozens of little simplified house-shaped modules is sin lit against the cloudless blue sky of bel air california, with the motor court hilariously glowing because it has been wet down for a photo shoot for the 2011 mls real estate listing of the house. the recessed entry has a mirror finish bronze double doorway with black and white hole patterns, like a cartoon swiss cheese, as designed by roy lichtenstein for his collectors, bud and betsy knapp. in a central bricked pit in the middle of the motor court, an uplit sculpture tower, a totem pole of flat, metal, gargantuan cartoon models of brushstrokes in green, yellow, and white, loom against the darkness, another late lichtenstein, from his era where what could be realized far outstripped what should be. via zillow
It makes a village: the wetted motor court of Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s Brobdignagian mutation of his House Pavilion, with a Lichtenstein brushstroke sculpture and a pair of bronze and glass Swiss cheese doors, from the 2011 MLS, still somehow on Zillow in 2026

The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.

a real estate listing photo of a mahogany colored paneled library with a grey and white jasper johns painting of a target, from 1992, over the fireplace. black leather club chairs, it doesn't matter what else the point of the photo is that people did show their trophy art in their real estate listings at one point.
People really did be having their Jasper Johns Target (1992) in their 2011 LA real estate listings. TBH except for the early Irwin, the art all looks like it was bought new for the house. Which feels very Bel Air.

At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective.