Edited from Wikipedia
Roy Fox Lichtenstein (October 27,
1923 – September 29, 1997) was a pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy
Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading
figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through
parody.
Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein
produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a
tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the
comic book style. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but
actually industrial painting".
Whaam! and Drowning Girl are
generally regarded as Lichtenstein's most famous works, with Oh, Jeff...I Love
You, Too...But... arguably third.
His most expensive piece is
Masterpiece, which was sold for $165 million in January 2017
Lichtenstein was born in New
York, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. He attended New York's Dwight School, graduating
from there in 1940. Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a
hobby, through school. He was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the
Apollo Theater in Harlem. He frequently drew portraits of the musicians playing
their instruments.
Lichtenstein then left New York
to study at 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 and after World War II between 1943 and 1946.
He returned to studies in Ohio under the
supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to
have had a significant impact on his future work
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 1949 Lichtenstein received a Master of Fine Arts
degree from Ohio State University.
In 1951, Lichtenstein had his
first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery in New York.
He moved to Cleveland in the same
year, where he remained for six years, although he frequently traveled back to
New York. During this time he undertook jobs as varied as a draftsman to a
window decorator in between periods of painting. His work at this time
fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism.
In 1957, he moved back to upstate
New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the
Abstract Expressionism style, being a late convert to this style of painting.
Lichtenstein began teaching in upstate New
York at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1958. About this time, he
began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse
and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works.
In 1960, he started teaching at
Rutgers University where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, who was
also a teacher at the university. This environment helped reignite his interest
in Proto-pop imagery.
In 1961, Lichtenstein began his
first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the
appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965 and
included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking.
In 1961, Leo Castelli started
displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York. Lichtenstein had his
first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was
bought by influential collectors before the show even opened.
A group of paintings produced
between 1961 and 1962 focused on solitary household objects such as sneakers,
hot dogs, and golf balls. In September 1963 he took a leave of absence from his
teaching position at Douglass College at Rutgers.
His works were inspired by comics
featuring war and romantic stories “At that time,” Lichtenstein later
recounted, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was
emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged
and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate
painting techniques".
It was at this time that
Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. He moved
back to New York to be at the center of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers
University in 1964 to concentrate on his painting.[26] Lichtenstein used oil
and Magna (early acrylic) paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl
(1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts
No. 83. (Drowning Girl now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.)
Drowning Girl also features thick outlines,
bold colors and Ben-Day dots, as if created by photographic reproduction. Of
his own work Lichtenstein would say that the Abstract Expressionists "put
things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color
positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of
putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking
calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."
Rather than attempt to reproduce
his subjects, Lichtenstein's work tackled the way in which the mass media
portrays them. He would never take himself too seriously, however, saying:
"I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it
transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to
art."
When Lichtenstein's work was first exhibited,
many art critics of the time challenged its originality. His work was harshly
criticized as vulgar and empty. The title of a Life magazine article in 1964
asked, "Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?"
Lichtenstein responded to such
claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is
to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my
work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely
different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be
difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument."
He discussed experiencing this
heavy criticism in an interview with April Bernard and Mimi Thompson in 1986.
Suggesting that it was at times difficult to be criticized, Lichtenstein said,
"I don't doubt when I'm actually painting, it's the criticism that makes
you wonder, it does."
Lichtenstein began experimenting
with sculpture around 1964, demonstrating a knack for the form that was at odds
with the insistent flatness of his paintings. For Head of Girl (1964), and Head
with Red Shadow (1965), he collaborated with a ceramicist who sculpted the form
of the head out of clay. Lichtenstein then applied a glaze to create the same
sort of graphic motifs that he used in his paintings; the application of black
lines and Ben-Day dots to three-dimensional objects resulted in a flattening of
the form
Most of Lichtenstein's best-known
works are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a
subject he largely abandoned in 1965, though he would occasionally incorporate
comics into his work in different ways in later decades.
Lichtenstein's works based on
enlarged panels from comic books engendered a widespread debate about their
merits as art. Lichtenstein himself admitted, "I am nominally copying, but
I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the
original acquires a totally different texture. It isn't thick or thin
brushstrokes, it's dots and flat colors and unyielding lines."
Although Lichtenstein's
comic-based work gained some acceptance, concerns are still expressed by
critics who say Lichtenstein did not credit, pay any royalties to, or seek
permission from the original artists or copyright holders.
In an interview for a BBC Four
documentary in 2013, Alastair Sooke asked the comic book artist Dave Gibbons if
he considered Lichtenstein a plagiarist. Gibbons replied: "I would say
'copycat'. In music for instance, you can't just whistle somebody else's tune
or perform somebody else's tune, no matter how badly, without somehow crediting
and giving payment to the original artist. That's to say, this is 'WHAAM! by
Roy Lichtenstein, after Irv Novick'."
In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein
reproduced masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso before embarking on
the Brushstrokes series in 1965. Lichtenstein continued to revisit this theme
later in his career with works such as Bedroom at Arles that derived from
Vincent van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.
In 1970, Lichtenstein was
commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (within its Art and
Technology program developed between 1967 and 1971) to make a film. With the
help of Universal Film Studios, the artist conceived of, and produced, Three
Landscapes, a film of marine landscapes, directly related to a series of
collages with landscape themes he created between 1964 and 1966.[53] Although
Lichtenstein had planned on producing 15 short films, the three-screen
installation – made with New York-based independent filmmaker Joel Freedman –
turned out to be the artist's only venture into the medium.
Also in 1970, Lichtenstein
purchased a former carriage house in Southampton, Long Island, built a studio on
the property, and spent the rest of the 1970s in relative seclusion.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his style
began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before. Lichtenstein began
a series of Mirrors paintings in 1969. By 1970, while continuing on the Mirrors
series, he started work on the subject of entablatures. The Entablatures
consisted of a first series of paintings from 1971 to 1972, followed by a
second series in 1974–76, and the publication of a series of relief prints in
1976.[56] 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 Center,
Minneapolis) which incorporates five other previous works, fitted into the
scene.
During a trip to Los Angeles in
1978, Lichtenstein was fascinated by lawyer Robert Rifkind's collection of
German Expressionist prints and illustrated books. He began to produce works
that borrowed stylistic elements found in Expressionist paintings. The White Tree
(1980) evokes lyric Der Blaue Reiter landscapes, while Dr. Waldmann (1980)
recalls Otto Dix's Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926). Small colored-pencil drawings were
used as templates for woodcuts, a medium favored by Emil Nolde and Max
Pechstein, as well as Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Also in the late 1970s,
Lichtenstein's style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow
(1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen).
Lichtenstein died of pneumonia in
1997 at New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for
several weeks
Roy Lichtenstein sales records
Work Date Price Source
Big Painting No. 6 November 1970 $75,000
Torpedo...Los! 7 November 1989 $5.5M
Kiss II 1990 $6.0M
Happy Tears November 2002 $7.1M
In the Car 2005 $16.2M
Ohhh...Alright... November 2010 $42.6M
I Can See the Whole Room...and
There's Nobody in It! November
2011 $43.0M
Sleeping Girl 9 May 2012 $44.8M
Woman with Flowered Hat 15 May 2013 $56.1M
Nurse 9 November 2015 $95.4M
Masterpiece January 2017 $165M