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established 1990

A Little Art History

Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997

As a founding member of the 1960's pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein quickly became a major figure in American art by incorporating comic book characters and other icons of popular American culture into a quasi-parody of art. Ever original, he became instantly successful despite his intentional attempts to be an irritant in the world of art.

As the concept of pop art grew in popularity, it became more difficult to define exactly what it was or was not. What remained common among these works were the hard-edged, commercial techniques and colors used to portray culturally-popular (pop), representational images. Principal among the New York artists who developed this genre were Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wasselmann, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg.

Roy Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan, NYC, on October 27, 1923. The only son of a prosperous real estate dealer, he was a reserved and quiet child who often entertained himself by listening to serial radio shows such as "Flash Gordon" and "Mandrake the Magician."

By 16, he started taking courses at the Art Students League while attending public high school. After graduation, he went to Ohio State University to study art, but World War II interrupted his studies when he was drafted in 1943. After serving in Europe, he returned to Ohio to earn a master's degree in art (1951) and then started teaching art locally.

During this time, he continued to study art, married, and started a family. To augment his teaching salary, he arranged department store window displays and designed sheet metal forms for Republic Steel. Meanwhile, the developing abstract art movement in New York City began to capture his imagination, and he started making trips back east to attend art shows and associate with these new artists.

Through the 1950's, Lichtenstein painted and created sculptures in a variety of styles, many of them influenced by Picasso, Klee, and the current abstract expressionists. These early images involved anthropomorphic plants (i.e., with human characteristics), medieval subjects, and themes from American folklore--subjects that laid the foundation for the pop paintings of common American themes that he was soon to create.

By 1957, Lichtenstein had left Cleveland with his wife and two sons to teach a variety of art classes in the New York City area, while trying to get his painting career ignited. In New York he began to meet fellow artists who would soon define the pop art movement. This influence, along with exposure to the exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenburg, helped steer Lichtenstein into his first pop piece titled "Look Mickey" (1961), which was his first non-expressionist painting.

His first big show with his signature work was at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan in 1962. His style was an affront to abstract expressionism and, by comparison, looked flat and manufactured, as if sheets had been torn from the funny pages and the vivid colors depicted in Ben Day dots magnified to an absurd scale. Still, Lichtenstein had taken an everyday, anonymous format and made it into something that was his alone.

His works of the early 1960's made him instantly famous and successful. But some regarded him otherwise; Life magazine published an article that raised the rhetorical question: Is this the worst artist in America? Regardless, Lichtenstein became renowned for using popular images and presenting them with ironic twists while stressing arrangements of form and color. Classic among these is his cartoon rendering of "Secret Hearts," in which an attractive young woman is drowning while thinking to herself, "I don't care! I'd rather sink than call Brad for help!"

In an age where commercial art was despised among artists, Lichtenstein introduced his unique version of anti-art that he himself thought would be so deplorable that none would dare hang it. He was proven wrong, as his art was very well-received, and pop art was launched into the big time.

Roy Lichtenstein's works may at first have appeared trapped within a limited format; but as he kept exploring, he continued to discover new range and diversity. His works became unmistakably American as he progressed--pop icons were used to (arguably) portray the events that were occurring in his own life. For example, he painted the images of attractive young women in distress ("Drowning Girl" and "Frightened Girl") as his marriage was breaking up in the mid-1960's. Particularly poignant is his canvas "In the Car," which illustrates a strained and chilly silence between a young couple in a car.

By the late 1960's, pop art had faded and Lichtenstein stopped using comic book characters as source material, focusing instead on works that were reminiscent of Picasso, C‚zanne, and Mondrian. True to his style, he treated these works much the same as Andy Warhol handled the images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley--as brand names of popular culture.

During the same time he painted landscapes, interiors, and nudes. He also worked with sculpture and prints and created giant murals such as the five-story-tall "Mural with Blue Brush Strokes" that is currently displayed in the lobby of the Equitable Center in Manhattan.

Roy Lichtenstein didn't cultivate his celebrity like some of his pop art contemporaries did. Instead, he continued to explore and work on projects that he found appealing. He didn't take his art or himself too seriously, but continued to work right up to the time of his death on September 29, 1997. Roy Lichtenstein's legacy remains significant, as his unique contributions are still enjoyed throughout the world.

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