Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923 -1997) was born in New York, into a wealthy Jewish family. He was raised on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended New York’s Dwight School, graduating from there in 1940. He became interested in art and design whilst there, enrolling in Summer Classes at the Art Students League of New York throughout high school where he worked under Reginald Marsh. Lichtenstein then left New York to study at Ohio State University for a degree in fine arts. He joined the army between 1943-46, serving as an orderly, draftsman and artist.

Lichenstein was discharged from the army and returned to his studies in Ohio, under the supervision of Hoyt L. Sherman, a huge influence on his work. Lichtenstein then was hired as an art instructor at Ohio State immediately after his own graduation, which he held for ten years. In 1949 Lichtenstein received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Roy Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibition was at the Carlebach Gallery in New York. He fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism. In 1957, he moved back to upstate New York with his two young sons and began teaching again. He adopted an Abstract Expressionist style and begun to incorporate cameo images of cartoon characters in his own work. In 1960, his interest in Proto-pop imagery was ignited by the influence of Kaprow, his colleague at Rutgers University.

In 1961, Leo Castelly started displaying Lichtenstein’s work at his gallery in New York. Lichtenstein had a solo exhibition at the Castelli gallery in 1962, where his entire collection was purchased by influential art dealers before the show had even publically opened. His most celebrated image is arguably Whaam! (1963) which is exhibited in the Tate Modern, London, as it is one of the earliest known examples of pop art.

In 1964, Lichtenstein began experimenting with sculpture to great success, collaborating with a ceramicist to create his famed Head of Girl (1964) and Head with Red Shadow (1965). Throughout his life, Lichtenstein also experimented with multimedia techniques, including reproducing famous paintings, murals, printing and film. From the 1970s onwards, Lichtenstein received numerous awards for his services to the arts, including the 1977 Skowhegan Medal for Painting, the 1991 Creative Arts Award in Painting, the 1995 Kyoto Prize and the 1995 National Medal of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Tate, London, the Pasadena Art Museum in California, and museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hanover.

Several retrospectives have celebrated his career, including the “Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art” in Milan, the 2010 “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black and White Drawings” at the Morgan Library & Museum and the retrospective that toured from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His work can be found worldwide, including at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which holds the largest repository of the artist’s work, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig, the National Gallery of Australia, MoMa, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate in London.