Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American artist. A leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Lichtenstein is best known for his large-scale paintings inspired by comic books, advertisements, and mass-produced imagery. His art is represented in major museum collections worldwide, and he remains one of the most influential and recognizable artists of the 20th century.
Emerging in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein gained international recognition for works that employed bold outlines, flat colors, and his signature use of Ben-Day dots—a mechanical printing technique he meticulously replicated by hand. Through this approach, he challenged traditional distinctions between "high" art and popular culture, transforming seemingly banal source material into monumental, self-aware compositions. His work often explored themes of romance, war, consumerism, and art itself, frequently incorporating irony and detachment to comment on modern visual culture.
Beyond his comic-inspired paintings, Lichtenstein's wide-ranging career included sculpture, murals, prints, and reinterpretations of canonical works by artists such as Picasso, Monet, and Matisse. His best-known works include Look Mickey, Whaam!, and Drowning Girl, which helped define his visual language and establish Pop Art as a dominant movement of the era. His most expensive work, Masterpiece, sold privately in 2017 for a reported $165 million.
Lichtenstein received numerous accolades during his career, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979 and the National Medal of Arts in 1995. He also received several Honorary Doctorates in Fine Art from institutions, including California Institute of the Arts, Ohio State University, and George Washington University.
Early life and education
Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, into an upper middle class German-Jewish family in New York City. His father, Milton, was a real estate broker, and his mother, Beatrice, a homemaker. Lichtenstein was raised on New York City's Upper West Side and attended public school until he was 12. Lichtenstein then attended New York's Dwight School, graduating in 1940. He first became interested in art and design as a hobby, through school. Lichtenstein was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He frequently drew portraits of the musicians playing their instruments. In 1939, his last year of high school, Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.Lichtenstein then left New York to study at Ohio State University, which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army during and after World War II between 1943 and 1946. After being in training programs for languages, engineering in the Army Specialized Training Program, and pilot training, all of which were cancelled, Lichtenstein served as an orderly, draftsman, and artist.
Lichtenstein returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the Army with eligibility for the G.I. Bill. Lichtenstein returned to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work.
Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State University and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1949, Lichtenstein earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University.
Career
Early career and Abstract Expressionism
In 1951, Lichtenstein had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery in New York.He moved to Cleveland that same year, where he remained for six years, although Lichtenstein frequently traveled back to New York. During this time, he undertook jobs as varied as a draftsman to a window decorator in between periods of painting. Lichtenstein's work at this time fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism. In 1954, his first son, David Hoyt Lichtenstein, now a songwriter, was born. His second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was born two years later.
In 1957, Lichtenstein moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, being a late convert to this style of painting. Lichtenstein began teaching in upstate New York at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1958. Around this time, he began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works.
Breakthrough and Pop Art
In 1960, Lichtenstein started teaching at Rutgers University where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, who was also a teacher at the university. This environment helped reignite Lichtenstein's interest in Proto-pop imagery.In 1961, he began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965, and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking.
Lichtenstein's first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots was Look Mickey. This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" That same year, Lichtenstein produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons.
In 1961, Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York. Lichtenstein had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened. A group of paintings produced between 1961 and 1962 focused on solitary household objects such as sneakers, hot dogs, and golf balls. In September 1963, Lichtenstein took a leave of absence from his teaching position at Douglass College at Rutgers.
Lichtenstein's works were inspired by comics featuring war and romantic stories. "At that time," he later recounted, "I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques". His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". Lichtenstein described Pop Art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".
It was at this time that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. He moved back to New York to be at the center of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers University in 1964 to concentrate on his painting. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl, which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts No. 83, drawn by Tony Abruzzo. Drowning Girl also features thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots, as if created by photographic reproduction. Of his own work, Lichtenstein would say that the Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."
Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, Lichtenstein's work tackled the way in which the mass media portrays them. However, he would never take himself too seriously, saying: "I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art". When Lichtenstein's work was first exhibited, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. His work was harshly criticized as vulgar and empty. The title of a Life magazine article in 1964 asked, "Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?" Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument." He discussed experiencing this heavy criticism in an interview with April Bernard and Mimi Thompson in 1986. Suggesting that it was at times difficult to be criticized, Lichtenstein said, "I don't doubt when I'm actually painting, it's the criticism that makes you wonder, it does."
Lichtenstein's celebrated image Whaam! depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!" and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m. Whaam follows the comic strip-based themes of some of his previous paintings and is part of a body of war-themed work created between 1962 and 1964. It is one of his two notable large war-themed paintings. It was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1966, after being exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1963, and has remained in their collection ever since. In 1968, the Darmstadt entrepreneur Karl Ströher acquired several major works by Lichtenstein, such as Nurse, Compositions I, We rose up slowly and Yellow and Green Brushstrokes. After being on loan at the Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt for several years, the founding director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Peter Iden, was able to acquire a total of 87 works from the Ströher collection in 1981, primarily American Pop Art and Minimal Art for the museum under construction until 1991.
Lichtenstein began experimenting with sculpture around 1964, demonstrating a knack for the form that was at odds with the insistent flatness of his paintings. For Head of Girl, and Head with Red Shadow, Lichtenstein collaborated with a ceramicist who sculpted the form of the head out of clay. He then applied a glaze to create the same sort of graphic motifs that he used in his paintings; the application of black lines and Ben-Day dots to three-dimensional objects resulted in a flattening of the form.