Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist, best known for his large-scale paintings and prints based on comic strips. Along with fellow American artist Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein was one of the central figures of the American pop art movement in the 1960s, which celebrated popular, commercial images.

In the 1950s Lichtenstein painted works in a series of different styles. His subject matter also ranged from reproductions of 19th century paintings to commercial illustrations, and eventually comic strips. His trademark comic-book style dates from 1961, when he began to reproduce not only the subject matter but also the appearance of comic strips printed in newspapers. To accentuate the mass-produced quality of his cartoon heroines and fighter pilots, he imitated the newspaper printing style, using patterns of colored dots to achieve different tones (fewer dots read as a lighter shade), a limited number of colors, and heavy black outlines.

Throughout his career he consistently applied these comic-strip conventions to a wide variety of subjects, including takeoffs on the paintings of other artists, large expressionistic brushstrokes, and architectural details. He created a series based on well-known works by modern European masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet, and in 1996 based another series on Chinese landscape paintings. In his ceramic and painted bronze sculptures, Lichtenstein used the same flattening, two-dimensional devices of his paintings to depict subjects ranging from explosions to goldfish bowls, cups with steam rising from them, and brushstrokes floating in the air.

Born in New York City, Lichtenstein began his artistic studies in 1939 with American artist Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, New York City. He attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where he earned his M.F.A. (master of fine arts) degree in 1949. He stayed on to teach there for several years, and from 1957 taught at the State University of New York at Oswego. From 1960 to 1963 he taught at Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where avant-garde artist Allan Kaprow introduced him to a form of performance art called happenings, and to the artists who created the form, including Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. Lichtenstein’s first solo show of comic-strip paintings, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1962, was one of the first pop art exhibitions and created an art world sensation. In 1993 and 1994 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York City, held a retrospective exhibition of his work.