Roy Lichtenstein
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House I, created by Lichtenstein in 1996, is designed to be an optical illusion. The house is inverted; the point that seems to be the nearest corner is actually the farthest from the viewer. |
Roy Lichtenstein (
October 27,
1923 â€"
September 29,
1997) was a prominent
American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and
comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible."
Early years
Born into a middle class family in
1923 in
New York City, he attended public school until the age of 12, before being enrolled into a private academy for his secondary education. The academy did not have an art department, and he became interested in art and design as hobby outside of his schooling. He was an avid fan of
Jazz and often attended concerts at the
Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the musicians at their instruments. During
1939, in his final year at the academy, he enrolled in summer art classes at the
Arts Students League in
New York under the tutelage of
Reginald Marsh.
On graduating in
1940, Lichtenstein left
New York to study at the
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
World War II. He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his teachers at the time,
Hoyt L. Sherman, is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the
Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at
Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In
1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York, the exhibition was a minor success.
He moved to
Cleveland in
1951, where he remained for six years, doing jobs as various as draftsman to window decorator in between periods of painting. His work at this time was based on
cubist interpretations of other artist's paintings such as
Frederic Remington.In
1957 he moved back to upstate
New York and began teaching again. It is at this time that he adopted the
Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting; he showed his work in
1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.
He began teaching at
Rutgers University in
1960 where he was heavily influenced by
Allan Kaprow, also a tutor at the University.His first work to feature the large scale use of hard edged figures and
Benday Dots was
Look Mickey (
1961,
National Gallery,
Washington DC). In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. In
1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in
New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in
1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching in the same year.
Mature Style
Using oil and
Magna paint his best known works, such as
Drowning Girl (
1963,
Museum of Modern Art, New York), feature thick outlines, bold colors and
Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by
photographic reproduction. Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackles the way
mass media portrays them.
His most famous image is arguably
Whaam! (
1963,
Tate Gallery,
London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, featuring a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a dazzling red and yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the
onomatopoetic 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 (5'7" x 13'4").
Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in
1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by lesser known comic book artists such as
Russ Heath,
Tony Abruzzo,
Irv Novick, and
Jerry Grandinetti, who rarely received any credit. Artist
Dave Gibbons, said of Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies of the work of
Irv Novick and
Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated images." In response to complaints like that of Gibbons, Lichtenstein's obituary in
The Economist noted these artists "did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some threatened to sue him...But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein's achievement. His was the idea. "The art of today", he told an interviewer, "is all around us."
During the seventies and eighties, his work began to loosen and expand on what he had done before. He produced a series of "Artists Studios" which incorporated elements of his previous work. A notable example being
Artist's Studio, Look Mickey (
1973,
Walker Art Centre,
Minneapolis) which incorporates five other previous works, fitted into the scene.
In the late seventies this style was replaced with more
surreal works such as
Pow Wow (
1979,
Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst,
Aachen).
In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic including some notable public sculptures such as
Lamp in St. Mary's,
Georgia in
1978.
His painting
Torpedo...Los! sold at
Christie's for $5.5 million in
1989, a record sum at the time, one of only three artists to have attracted such huge sums for art by a living artist.
In 1995 Lichtenstein was awarded the
Kyoto Prize from the
Inamori Foundation in
Kyoto,
Japan.
In
1996 the
National Gallery of Art in
Washington DC became the largest single repository of the Artists work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation. He died of
pneumonia in
1997 at
New York University Medical Center. Twice married, he was survived by his wife, Dorothy, whom he wed in
1968 and by his sons, David and
Mitchell, from his first marriage.
*
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation*
Image Duplicator (search engine for artworks of Lichtenstein, created and maintained by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation)
*
The Art Archive*
Use Photoshop to convert your photos into Lichtenstein inspired works*
Side by side comparisons of Lichtenstein's works with the originals drawn by other artist (the originals are on the left)Selection of galleries showing Lichtenstein's work
*
Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art*
National Gallery, Washington DC (USA)*
Tate Modern (UK)*
Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art (D)*
Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (USA)*
New York Museum of Modern Art (USA)*
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL)*
Ludwig Museum, Cologne (D)*
Castelli Gallery, New York (USA)*
Guggenheim Museum, New York (USA)*
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA)*
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (USA)*
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (USA)*
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (USA)*Roy Lichtenstein - Janis Hendrickson - ISBN 3-8228-0281-6
*The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein : A Catalogue Raisonne 1948-1997 - Mary L Corlett - ISBN 1555951961
*Roy Lichtenstein (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 1) - Lawrence Alloway - ISBN 0896593312
* Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Chris Hunt - DVD and VHS - Image Entertainment 1991
* Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Melvyn Bragg - VHS Cat No. PHV6019
*
Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963 - Ed. Joan Marter - ISBN 0813526094 - Information on Lichtenstein's work done at Rutgers and the influence of Allan Kaprow on his style.
*
"Historically, copying the Masters was considered to be a part of the painter's training, not the final product" by Rian Hughes,
Eye Magazine*
Obituary in the
Economist (subscription required)
