ON VIEW

(b. New York, NY, 1923)

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate. His early work was highly interested in American mythologies and frequently referred to images of early American history taken from genre painting, but his practice changed radically in the early 1960s. It was then that he began to use imagery found in advertising and comic books: sources that would have been considered too crude for art’s formal concerns. Over the course of decades, Lichtenstein devoted his practice to exploring art’s collision with popular culture, rendered in a style that mimicked that of the benday print processes used in newspaper reproduction. These strategies of mechanized visual shorthand were employed to reexamine art history through the lens of contemporary life.

In 1964, Lichtenstein became the first American to exhibit at the Tate Gallery, London, on the occasion of the show "'54–'64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade." Lichtenstein later participated in documentas IV (1968) and VI in (1977). Lichtenstein had his first retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969. The Guggenheim presented a second Lichtenstein retrospective in 1994. Lichtenstein became the first living artist to have a solo drawing exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987. Recent retrospective surveys include the 2003 "All About Art," Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark which traveled on to the Hayward Gallery, London, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, until 2005; and "Classic of the New", Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005), "Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art" Museo Triennale, Milan 2010, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In late 2010 The Morgan Library & Museum showed Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961–1968. Another major retrospective opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2012 before going to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2013. In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. became the largest single repository of the artist's work when Lichtenstein donated 154 prints and 2 books. The Art Institute of Chicago has several important works by Lichtenstein in its permanent collection, including Brushstroke with Spatter (1966) and Mirror No. 3 (Six Panels) (1971). The personal holdings of Lichtenstein's widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, and of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation number in the hundreds.[88] In Europe, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne has one of the most comprehensive Lichtenstein holdings with Takka Takka (1962), Nurse (1964), Compositions I (1964), besides the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst with We rose up slowly (1964) and Yellow and Green Brushstrokes (1966).

Lichtenstein lived and worked in New York, NY until his death in 1997.