Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is among the most widely reproduced images the artist has made, and that is the single most important commercial fact about it for an owner.

Canvas reproductions, posters, offset prints, framed decorative versions and outright fakes of this image circulate in enormous numbers, and a great many of them are framed to look like the real thing. More enquiries about this image turn out to concern a reproduction than for any other print in the catalogue. Establishing that a sheet is a Pictures on Walls screenprint comes before any discussion of value.

A screenprint sits on the surface of the paper in discrete layers of flat ink with crisp edges; an offset reproduction is built from a dot screen and looks continuous under magnification. The sheet is heavy wove paper with full margins, a pencil line along the bottom edge and a publisher's blind stamp.

If a work is on canvas, it is not this edition. If it is trimmed to the image with no margin, it is very unlikely to be. If there is no blind stamp and no pencil numbering, the question is settled before it reaches condition.

Grey and other variants exist outside the standard release and are recorded separately, in smaller numbers.

Those are genuinely scarcer and priced well above the standard edition, which makes correct identification worth doing carefully rather than assuming a colour difference is a printing inconsistency or fading.