LICHTENSTEIN, ROY

LICHTENSTEIN, ROY (1923–1997), U.S. painter, printmaker, and sculptor. One of the leading figures of the Pop Art movement, Lichtenstein was born in New York. He briefly studied with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York (summer 1939), and then pursued a B.F.A. (1947) and an M.F.A. (1949) at Ohio State University (1940–43; 1946–49), his progress interrupted by several years in the Army. Early in his career Lichtenstein experimented with Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and other modern styles. In the late 1950s he even rendered the comic subjects that would become synonymous with his name in a loose, painterly fashion. Lichtenstein derived his first paintings based on comic images from his children's bubble-gum wrappers. These early works, such as Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), did not yet simulate newsprint techniques and remain closely allied with the original source in color and composition. Within a year Lichtenstein began his enlarged reproductions of comic book scenes rendered in primary colors without modulation, thick black outlines, and an imitation Benday dot technique akin to newsprint. According to Lichtenstein, the subjects of his early paintings – the melodrama of his heartbroken beauties and the violent deaths of his war heroes – were not of interest to him. Rather, he said, the comics were simply used for formal reasons. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Lichtenstein began quoting well-known works of art and also paraphrasing popular art forms in his signature comic book style. The "Brush-stroke" paintings of 1965–66 show enlarged gestural marks that mock Abstract Expressionism by the very dichotomy of Lichtenstein's lucid technique and the thick, dripping oil paint he reproduces. Lichtenstein found great success with the comic-styled works, enjoying his first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, followed by a retrospective on the East Coast at the Guggenheim Museum in New York two years later. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, Lichtenstein continued to use the history of art as his source material, quoting major paintings by the German Expressionists, the Surrealists, and other avant-garde artists. The last decades of his life were marked by several series, including a cycle of "Interiors" derived from advertisements. Throughout his career Lichtenstein was also an active printmaker. On occasion he would execute sculptures such as the Mermaid (1979) that lounges on the grass in front of the Miami Beach Theater for Performing Arts. In 1989 he made a 23 by 54 foot mural for the entrance hall of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein (1983); B. Rose, The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein (1987); D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein (1993); M.L. Corlett, The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné (1948–1997) (2002). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)