SFMOMA, Part 37: Floor 4, Fisher Collection, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
It is nine feet tall and fourteen feet wide, and it is a sunset that refuses to behave like one.
Figures with Sunset (1978) sprawls across the gallery wall in hot oranges and cool geometric blues, and the longer you look the less it resolves. There's a wooden plank rising vertically on the left that turns out to be a face. There's a squiggly, melting torso draped in cream-colored fabric at the bottom right — a reclining lady, holding a mirror. A red sun radiates out of an inverted triangle. Above it, in the sky, a big black-and-white smear: a brushstroke, Lichtenstein's own signature mark, quoted back at himself. Somewhere near a yellow wall stands a figure in a hat and a red tie, and nobody — not the curator, not the audio guide, not you — can say for certain who he is.
SFMOMA knows exactly how disorienting this is, because the museum's own audio guide for the painting is staged as a game show. A host named Marty points at details while contestants guess the references — Max Ernst? Picasso? Dalí? — and get buzzed wrong, because the painting isn't a quiz with answers. It's a mashup. Lichtenstein spent the 1960s teaching America to read comic panels; in 1978, fourteen feet wide, he taught himself to read the entire history of modern art, and then he remixed it.
Roy Lichtenstein painted Figures with Sunset in 1978, in oil and magna on canvas. It measures 271.8 × 424.2 cm — roughly 9 × 14 feet. It belongs to the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection and is on view on Floor 4 as part of Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, in the monographic Lichtenstein gallery of the reimagined Fisher Collection presentation that opened April 18, 2026. It anchors the room the way a horizon anchors a landscape. Entry is included with general admission.
The easy reading is: Lichtenstein doing cubism, the fragmented figures and the geometric sunset, a late-career homage to Picasso. And that reading is correct, as far as it goes — the painting is explicitly in dialogue with Picasso and Léger and Ernst and Dalí. But the subject is sharper than that. Figures with Sunset isn't an homage. It's a heist. Lichtenstein spent the 1970s feeding the whole canon of modernism through his dot screen — the one machine in art that makes everything it touches look equally mass-produced — and this painting is the score: cubism, surrealism, and the romantic sunset, flattened into a single fourteen-foot surface, all of it equally Lichtenstein's and none of it quite anyone's.
1977–1979: Lichtenstein eats art history
By the late 1960s, the comic panels were done — or the market had done them — and Lichtenstein did what no one expected: he turned art history itself into his source material. The Brushstroke paintings. The Mirrors. The Entablatures, those fake classical friezes painted like architectural clip-art. And then, around 1977, the big studio interiors and the so-called Surrealist paintings: Lichtenstein painting the history of modernism as if it were a comic strip he could redraw.
Figures with Sunset is deep in this phase, and the references come at you the way samples come at you in a hip-hop track — layered, unattributed, transformed. The plank-face nods at German Dada, at Max Ernst's wooden apparitions. The melting torso is Dalí by way of a joke — the great surrealist's signature move, rendered in Lichtenstein's deadpan dots. The reclining lady with the mirror is Picasso's territory, the fractured figure reassembled as geometry. The whole thing is cubism, but cubism as Lichtenstein understands it: not a revolution in seeing, but a style, a set of moves, a vocabulary that can be quoted the way you quote a slogan.
This is the move the purists hated and the move that now looks prophetic. In 1978, treating Picasso as raw material — as content — was close to blasphemy. Today it's the default condition of visual culture: everything sampled, everything remixed, authorship dissolved into the feed. Lichtenstein got there first, with a stencil and a fourteen-foot canvas, and he did it without a drop of anxiety about influence. The anxiety was the other painters' problem. He was busy.
The sunset that won't set
And then there's the sunset itself — the red disc radiating out of its inverted triangle, sitting on a horizon that is also, unmistakably, a compositional device. The sunset was a recurring motif for Lichtenstein, and it's the strangest choice he could have made: the one subject that the entire language of mechanical reproduction was designed to make impossible. A sunset is atmosphere, feeling, the sublime. The dot screen is the opposite of all three. Painting a sunset in Ben-Day dots is like writing a love letter in spreadsheet formulas.
Which is exactly why it works. Up close, the painting is all surface — magna and oil laid down with machine evenness, the hand-painted dots and diagonal shading doing the work of a printing press. Step back, and the image assembles the way a halftone assembles in newsprint: your eye completes what the hand refused to do. The romance of the horizon, delivered by a machine. The orange is genuinely orange — your body responds to fourteen feet of it before your brain finishes the art-historical joke. Lichtenstein, the great ironist, ends up producing one of the most physically overwhelming sunsets in the building precisely because he refused to emote about it. The colder the method, the hotter the result.
The game-show audio guide gets this exactly right, by accident or design: the contestants keep reaching for the learned reference — Ernst! Dalí! Léger! — and the buzzer keeps telling them they're overthinking it. You don't have to know every quotation to feel the painting. You just have to stand in front of fourteen feet of mechanical dusk and let it do what sunsets do, which is stop you for a minute. The machine learned to dream, or to imitate dreaming. For Lichtenstein, those were always the same thing.
The painting, again
So back to Floor 4, back to the wall that won't resolve. Find the figure in the hat and the red tie, standing just left of the yellow wall. The audio guide admits it doesn't know who he is, and that admission is the whole painting in miniature: the references are real, the recognition is partial, the mystery is structural. Lichtenstein isn't testing your art history. He's showing you what art history looks like once it's been through the culture industry — fragmented, flattened, fourteen feet wide, and somehow still capable of stopping you cold.
The Fishers collected Lichtenstein in depth — two dozen works, the early panels and the late monuments alike — because the argument of the collection needs the whole arc: the man who taught America to see the comic as art, then taught art to see itself as content. Figures with Sunset is the arc's wide-screen climax. You can't hang anything next to it. The room understands this. The painting gets its wall, and the wall is barely enough.
Go at the end of your Floor 4 loop. Let the Flavin tint your skin, let the Guston ruin your mood, let the Martin quiet you down — and then walk into the mechanical dusk. It's the loudest quiet painting in the building, and the sunset, rendered in dots, still hasn't set. 🌁
Timeline — Roy Lichtenstein
1962 — Live Ammo (Tzing!); the war comics at gallery scale
Mid-1960s — the Brushstroke paintings: the expressive mark as graphic device
Late 1960s — Mirrors, Entablatures: art history becomes source material
1977–79 — the large studio interiors and Surrealist paintings; the canon as content
1978 — Figures with Sunset, oil and magna on canvas, ~9 × 14 ft.; cubism, surrealism, and the romantic sunset through the dot screen
1990s — the bronze brushstrokes; the late landscapes and nudes
1997 — dies September 29, New York, age 73
Today — Figures with Sunset on view, Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street