Roy Lichtenstein

  • Born: October 27, 1923
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: September 29, 1997
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American painter and sculptor

As one of the most well-known and characteristic leaders of the pop art movement, Lichtenstein created art from the common images of popular culture, such as graphics found in comic books and advertising, and on commercial posters.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Roy Lichtenstein (LIHK-tehn-stin) grew up in a middle-class household in New York City. His father, Milton, was a realtor, and his mother, Beatrice, worked in the home. Although art was not taught at his high school, he nonetheless began to draw on his own. He also enjoyed jazz and liked to make portraits of the musicians in the city. He took Saturday classes at Parsons School of Design, and in the summer after graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School for Boys, took classes at the Art Students League, where he studied painting with Reginald Marsh. In the fall he entered the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and served in Europe. After the war’s end, he studied briefly in France before returning to Ohio State in 1946, earning an M.F.A. in 1949.

While at the university, Lichtenstein’s primary mentor was Hoyt L. Sherman, who introduced him to concepts in modern art and to the study of the process of visual perception. One of Sherman’s teaching exercises involved flashing a projected image in a darkened room for a tenth of a second, and then asking the students to draw what they had seen.

Life’s Work

Lichtenstein taught at his alma mater for a few years and then worked as a graphic designer and draftsman in Cleveland, Ohio. He returned to the New York area and taught at the State University of New York at Oswego from 1957 to 1960. During this time, he explored the application of modern styles such as expressionism and cubism to American historical subjects. He also quoted from famous paintings from earlier periods. The idea of quotation in art involved transforming quoted material and changing its context. He also started to integrate some aspects of his earlier freelance work in commercial-industrial design and experimented with abstract compositions.

Lichtenstein’s lithograph The Ten Dollar Bill (1956) has been identified as a forerunner of his mature pop art style. After this, he began working with images from Disney, producing Look Mickey and other cartoon characters in 1961, discovering a fertile source of thematic material for transformation and manipulation. A single frame from an animated cartoon, or a single panel from a comic strip, could be lifted out of its narrative sequence, expanded in size to fill the space of a large painting, and utilized as a composition. Like the briefly flashing images in Sherman’s classes, the impact of an image’s total structure could be captured and rendered in new ways.

That same year, Lichtenstein left Oswego to teach at Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At the time, Rutgers had a group of modern artists who were active in pushing back the conceptual boundaries between the arts disciplines. There he met Allan Kaprow, a faculty colleague who was creating Happenings, dynamic art events with some connection to the Dada experiments in Europe after World War I. Happenings incorporated into art various items from everyday life, much as the influential composer John Cage was doing in music at the time.

In terms of images, there was an obvious connection to the kinds of material Lichtenstein was using in his new work. In working with subjects derived from comic strips, Lichtenstein did not stop at using their strong lines, flat areas of color, and severely restricted palette. He also incorporated their convention of communicating sound through text boxes; and in the process of magnifying the images, he magnified the mechanical benday dot patterns that were used by comic-book publishers to conserve ink when printing on cheap paper. In Lichtenstein’s paintings, the dots themselves, swollen into filled spheres stretching repetitiously across continuous areas of the canvas, became part of the compositions.

In 1961, Kaprow introduced Lichtenstein to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Karp in turn introduced Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol, who was heading in a similar direction aesthetically. The gallery started selling Lichtenstein’s paintings and providing him with a stipend. In 1962, he exhibited some of his new works in his first one-man show at the Castelli Gallery. The show was a great success, and Lichtenstein continued to work with his new style, expanding his subjects to include genre comics such as war and romance.

Lichtenstein had some skeptics. Not everyone appreciated the creativity and skill with which he approached his work, but others noted parallels between the work of Lichtenstein, Warhol, and other American artists and the pop art movement that had recently emerged in England. Lichtenstein soon became regarded as a leader of the American pop art movement, which had developed as a response to abstract expressionism. Pop artists created representational art using familiar popular-culture images and objects such as comic strips, supermarket products, billboards, and magazine advertisements. Lichtenstein’s reputation grew and he exhibited internationally.

Although Lichtenstein was primarily a painter, he also worked in printmaking and sculpture. Another theme he explored over a long period was the depiction of brushstrokes. Just as he had expanded the comic book panels, he used strong lines and areas without gradients to create simplified, stylized representations of single brushstrokes, magnifying and superimposing them on plain or very simple backgrounds, sometimes with his characteristic benday patterns. He even made some of them into large sculptures that emphasized their flat qualities by intersecting the brushstrokes as planes.

On September 29, 1997, Lichtenstein died in New York City. He had suffered from pneumonia and died from related complications.

Significance

Lichtenstein was a key figure in pop art, one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Along with Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and others, he challenged the separation of fine art and mass production. In particular, he was known for being able to magnify and transform the details of production (dot patterns and paint brushstrokes).

Lichtenstein’s posthumous fame continued to grow, with solo and touring exhibitions throughout the world, and his many pieces continue to increase in value. A month after his death, Kiss II, which Lichtenstein had painted in 1962, was sold to Tokyo’s Fujii Gallery for more than six million dollars. His works are in private collections and in permanent museum collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York; Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; and the Osaka Maritime Museum in Japan. There are Lichtenstein public sculptures throughout the United States, and in cities around the world, including Singapore, Paris, Barcelona, Zurich, and Tokyo.

Bibliography

Corlett, Mary L. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948-1997. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002. Coordinated with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., retrospective exhibition, this is the first complete catalog of Lichtenstein’s prints, including book and magazine illustrations, posters, and twenty-three prints completed between 1993 and his death in 1997. Close to four hundred color plates and sixty black-and-white illustrations.

Hickey, Dave. Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstrokes, Four Decades. New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2002. Exhibition catalog that traces the evolution of Lichtenstein’s brushstroke and painting style from the late 1950’s through the 1990’s. Includes photographs of Lichtenstein at work. Sixty color illustrations.

Lichtenstein, Roy. Roy Lichtenstein: Early Black and White Paintings. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2001. Beautifully illustrated catalog for an exhibition held in 2001. Includes essays by Robert Rosenblaum and Frederic Tuten. Valuable historical account of how Lichtenstein’s later pop art vocabulary, sources, motifs, and simplicity were already present in his early black-and-white paintings.

Lobel, Michael. Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Scholarly and provocative new interpretation of Lichtenstein as an artist who struggled with the tension between expressing artistic vision and identity and the effect of mechanical reproduction on a work of art. Also presents newly discovered archival materials and other valuable information. Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Waldman, Diane. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Rizzoli, 1993. Scholarly publication that accompanied the Lichtenstein retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1993. Examines the artist’s career, unique style, and creative process through analyses of his themes and source materials. Contains 350 color illustrations. Bibliography and index.

1941-1970: December, 1952: Rosenberg Defines “Action Painting.”