Background

Ethnicity: Roy Lichtenstein's family belonged to the an upper-middle-class and was Jewish. His father came from Brooklyn, New York, and his mother was born in New Orleans and raised in Connecticut.

Roy Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States on October 27, 1923. He was the first-born of Milton Lichtenstein, a real estate broker for Lichtenstein & Loeb and co-owner of Garage Realty, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (maiden name Werner), a homemaker.

Milton took part in World War I. Beatrice gave piano lessons and it was she who introduced her children to the culture sending them to different concerts and museums in New York City, such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art.

Education

Roy Lichtenstein started to attend New York kindergarten in 1928. Three years later, he entered New York's college preparatory school, Dwight School. Then, Roy pursued his studies at the Franklin School for Boys in New York Сity, a private junior high and high school where he studied French and Latin.

Roy revealed his artistic faculties in early childhood. The boy adored drawing and sculpting as well as designing model airplanes, he played piano and clarinet, and was fascinated by jazz which he often listened to at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Lichtenstein even had a jazz band. The young Lichtenstein always sketched performing artists, for example, the jazz musicians and the actors of the show Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin at the Alvin Theater in 1935.

While in school, Lichtenstein attended different painting classes, including watercolor classes at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons School of Design) and the summer classes at the Art Students League of New York under Reginald Marsh where the boy studied painting and drawing from the model. Lichtenstein graduated from the high school on June 1940.

The autumn of the same year, Roy Lichtenstein entered the Ohio State University. He interrupted his studies for three years to serve in the World War II. During the military service, Lichtenstein attended a French Language and Civilization course at the Sorbonne in Paris through the Army's civilian agency AEP program. He assisted the engineering training at DePaul University, Chicago and one-month pilot-training program according to the Army Special Training Program as well.

One of Lichtenstein's teachers at the Ohio University, Hoyt L. Sherman, had a great influence on his artistic mindset. Roy Lichtenstein graduated from the university in 1946 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

A year later, to pursue his studies at the university, Lichtenstein enrolled at the Graduate School of Fine and Applied Arts where he received the Master of Arts degree with the thesis "Paintings, Drawings, and Pastels."

Later, Roy Lichtenstein obtained multiple Honorary Doctorate degrees from different universities, including the California Institute of the Arts (1977), Southampton College (1980), Ohio State University (1988), Bard College, Royal College of Art (1993), and the George Washington University (1996). All of them were in fine arts, except the degree in humanities from Ohio State University.

Career

Roy Lichtenstein's career started from the military service at United States Army during the World War II. While in the army, Lichtenstein had different duties in many posts. So, he served at first as an orderly and became a two-star major general. He also dealed with painting tasks working as a draftsman, for example, drawing maps. For some time, Lichtenstein read the lectures on the War in Europe and the Pacific at the Army's Information and Education School. He left the army in the rank of Private First Class as a Draftsman.

Lichtenstein became an instructor of the School of Fine and Applied Arts faculty at Ohio State University in 1946 and held this position till 1951 when he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, United States and organized his own studio at the Music Center Building. The same year, his first solo show took place at the Carlebach Gallery in New York City and was followed by the show at John Heller Gallery in New York City a year later.

Roy's paintings didn't bring him a lot of income in Cleveland, so he was obliged to have several part-time jobs, such as industrial draftsman, furniture designer, window dresser, and even mechanic. The subjects of his artworks during this period were related to the American West and had the traces both of Cubism and Expressionism.

The painter returned to his teaching activity in 1957 when he came back to New York City and was hired to teach the industrial design as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. In September 1960, Lichtenstein changed his post of an assistant professor at the University to the equal position at Douglass Residential College of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey by receiving an invitation from the new head of the art department of the educational institution, Reginald Neal. There, in New Jersey, Lichtenstein organized a studio.

At this time, the artist began hiding images of comic strip figures (such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Bugs Bunny) in his paintings, the classic examples of which are Popeye and Look Mickey. For his early pop paintings, Lichtenstein used some typical things of commercial art as well: golf balls, athletic shoes, hot dogs, and other consumer products. The first of such paintings was the Emigrant Train after William Ranney (1951) or another work, Girl with Ball (1961) in the cheesecake pose. The pop paintings were presented at Castelli gallery from February 10 to March 3 in 1962 and made Lichtenstein popular.

The artist left the post at Rutgers University and devoted himself to painting. Then, he started to design mass-products, such as a shopping bag for the American Supermarket show in 1964. Lichtenstein also created versions of paintings by Piet Mondrian, Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, and Claude Monet's haystacks. Lichtenstein's paintings became more abstract in the late 1960s.

During the 1970th, Roy Lichtenstein continued his experiments with new styles which lead to the appearance of "mirror" paintings series. The works consisted of sphere-shaped canvases with areas of color and dots. One of such pictures, Self-portrait (1978), is similar to the work of René Magritte in its playful placement of a mirror where a human head should be. At the same time, Lichtenstein also produced several still lifes in different styles. The artist created a film of marine landscapes called Three Landscapes (1970) for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In the 1980th and 1990th, Lichtenstein began to mix and match styles. Other paintings treat, in a similarly stylized and often ironic manner, the subjects and forms characteristic of cubism, fauvism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and other modern art movements. A series of large canvases from the early 1990s depicts room interiors, based on images from telephone directories. A series of sea-themed works followed.

The last years of his life, Roy Lichtenstein worked on multiple murals, as well as on public sculptures commissioned in Miami Beach, Columbus, Minneapolis, Paris, Barcelona, and Singapore.

Achievements

• Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most powerful and inventive artists of the 20th century who created about more than 5,000 works during his life.
  
  Lichtenstein's art style was widely recognized. The artist received many prizes and awards on different times. Among his early prizes are the first prize for the woodcut To Battle in 1950 and the first prize in sculpture for Knight on Horseback a year later, both at the Ohio State Fair.
  
  Lichtenstein's artworks were presented all around the world during and after his life. His retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987, both in New York City, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2003), at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria (2005) are amomg such exhibitions. One of the most recent exhibitions of Lichtenstein's art was organized in 2018 at The Tate Liverpool, Merseyside, United Kingdom.
  
  Many of Lichtenstein's artworks broke the sales records many times. The most expensive painting, Masterpiece, was sold in January 2017 for $165 million.
  
  Lichtenstein's art style continues to influence the art nowadays. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, established two years after the artist's death, preserve the heritage of the painter. The organization created special Image Database, called Image Duplicator (has a web-site, www.imageduplicator.com), that helps to find principal facts about Roy Lichtenstein and his documented works known to the Foundation.The current Foundation project is a catalogue raisonné which will englobe more full information about the artist and his works.
  
  The foundation also contributes to the development of art by donating and sponsoring different cultural and artistic organizations as well as distributing fellowships among talented artists.
  
  Lichtenstein's painting Crying Girl appeared in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Goldfish Bowl II

  • The Den

  • Big Painting VI

• collage

  • Collage for Nude with White

• painting

  • Alka Seltzer

  • Interior with Water Lilies

  • Glass and Lemon in a Mirror

  • Sunrise

  • Thinking of Him

  • Cape Cod Still Life

  • Compositions II

  • Modular Painting with Four Panels, #1

  • Still Life with Windmill

  • Still Life after Picasso

  • Nonobjective II

  • Coast Village

  • M-Maybe

  • Modular Painting with Four Panels, #6

  • Face (Green Nose)

  • Interior with Mobile

  • Whaam!

  • Interior with Mirrored Wall

  • Landscape

  • Bread in Bag

  • Takka Takka

  • Stepping Out

  • Arctic Landscape

  • Live Ammo (Ha! Ha! Ha!)

  • Tomato and Abstraction

  • Mr. Bellamy

  • Brattata

  • Bull I

  • In the Car

  • Brushstrokes

  • Mirror #3 (Six Panels)

  • Desk Calendar

  • Mirror

  • Woman with Hat

  • Mirror #1 (Six Panels)

  • Mad Scientist

  • Reflections on the Artist's Studio

  • Gullscape

  • Nude on Beach

  • Collage for Reflections on Hair

  • Bull VI

  • Red Barn II

  • Yellow and Green Brushstrokes

  • Him

  • Pow Wow

  • Bedroom at Arles

  • Mirror #4

  • Kiss

  • Interior with Restful Paintings

  • Modern Painting with Wedge

  • The Red Horseman

  • Spray

  • Stretcher Frame

  • Jet Pilot

  • The Valve

  • Still Life with Crystal Bowl

  • Drowning Girl

  • Forget It! Forget Me!

  • Hot Dog

  • Magnifying Glass

  • Man with Folded Arms

  • I Love Liberty

  • Girl with Ball

  • Figures with Sunset

  • Still Life with Goldfish

  • Woman in Bath

  • Kitchen Range

  • Interior with Mirrored Closet

  • Modular Painting with Four Panels #2

  • Untitled

  • Washing Machine

  • Landscape with Figures and Rainbow

  • Girl in Window (Study for World's Fair Mural)

  • Sailboats

  • No - Nox

  • Standing Rib

  • Ruins

  • Imperfect Painting

  • Bull III

  • Head - Red and Yellow

  • Still Life with Dossier

  • Roto Broil

  • Perfect Painting #1

  • Woman in a Wheelchair

  • Tel Aviv Mural

  • Look Mickey

  • Sailboats through the Trees

  • Baked Potato

  • Curtains

  • Crying Girl

  • Interior with Cactus

  • Artist's Studio, "The Dance"

  • Modern Painting with Clef

  • Baked Potato

  • The Grip

  • Nurse

  • Reflections on Crash

  • We Rose Up Slowly

  • Yellow Brushstroke I

  • Hopeless

  • Little Big Painting

  • Preparedness

  • Yellow Landscape

  • Bauhaus Stairway

  • Mirror #10

  • Mirror #2

  • Rouen Cathedral Set V

  • Tire

  • Popeye

  • Brushstrokes

  • Mirror I

  • House II

  • Blam

  • Bobby Kennedy

  • Gun in America

• poster

  • Little Aloha

  • Hey You

• print

  • Sandwich and Soda

  • Girl at piano

• sculpture

  • Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight

  • Barcelona Head

  • Explosion I

  • Wall Explosion II

  • Glass IV

Politics

Among Roy Lichtenstein's works there are paintings reflecting major national news in the political field. There are Bobby Kennedy and Gun in America, both of 1968, which appeared by the commission from Time magazine to be used as the covers. The first one was created during the Kennedy's presidential campaign, the latter on Kennedy's assassination. Gun in America caused a debate on the gun violence and gun control.

Views

Roy Lichtenstein was, he said apropos his attitude to experiments in 1963, "anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle, anti-movement and light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-quality, anti-Zen, and anti all of those brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everybody understands so thoroughly."

Many of Lichtenstein paintings touched the question of fetishisation by depecting femme fatales as well as the abandonned women.

Quotations: "Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms."

"I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it."

"Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself."

"I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way."

"I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me."

"Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this."

"I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like."

"I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way."

"Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence."

"I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picasso's; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures."

"In America the biggest is the best."

Membership

Roy Lichtenstein was a member of Phi Sigma Delta society in Ohio State University, the National Institute of Arts and Letters (currently the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), the American Academy in Rome (as an artist-in-residence), and the Royal Academy of Arts.

• Phi Sigma Delta , United States

  1940

• National Institute of Arts and Letters , United States

  May 23, 1979

• American Academy in Rome , Italy

  March 15, 1989 - May 15, 1989

• Royal Academy of Arts , United Kingdom

  May 23, 1994

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy."
  
  Art Spiegelman, an American cartoonist: "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."
  
  Eddie Campbell, Scottish comics artist and cartoonist: "Lichtenstein took a tiny picture, smaller than the palm of the hand, printed in four color inks on newsprint and blew it up to the conventional size at which 'art' is made and exhibited and finished it in paint on canvas."
  
  Dave Gibbons, an English comics artist: "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'."
  
  Andy Warhol, an American painter: "If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now [1963]. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that's going to be the whole new scene."

Interests

• In the childhood Roy Lichtenstein liked such radio programs as The Shadow, Jack Armstrong, Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician.

• Artists

  Rembrandt, Honoré Daumier, Pablo Picasso

• Music & Bands

  jazz

Connections

Roy Lichtenstein was married twice. His first wife became Isabel Wilson on June, 12, 1949. She was an assistant director at the Ten-Thirty Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio who had divorced an artist Michael Sarisky. Lichtenstein and Wilson lived together for six years and had two sons. Their names are David Hoyt, born on October 9, 1954, and Mitchell Wilson, born on March 10, 1956.

Lichtenstein met his second wife, Dorothy Herzka, a gallery employee at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York, in 1964 when he took part in the American Supermarket show. Dorothy was his partner till the end of his life.

Father:

Milton Lichtenstein

(26 October 1893 – 13 February 1946)

Mother:

Beatrice Lichtenstein

(née Werner; 1896 – 1991)

colleague:

Robert Watts

(original name Robert Marshall Watts; 14 June 1923 – 2 September 1988)

A professor of art at Douglass Residential College, Rutgers University, New Jersey from 1953 to 1984, Watts was associated with Fluxus group of artists.

colleague:

Geffroy Hendricks

(30 July 1931 – 12 May 2018)

A professor of art at Rutgers University from 1956 to 2003, Hendricks was known as the member of Fluxus since the middle 1960s.

Sister:

Renée Lichtenstein

(17 December 1927)

ex-wife:

Isabel Wilson

(née Wilson; 26 July 1921 – 25 September 1980)

Wife:

Dorothy Herzka

(1939)

Son:

David Hoyt Lichtenstein

(9 October 1954)

He is a songwriter.

Son:

Mitchell Wilson Lichtenstein

(10 March 1956)

He is an actor, writer, producer and director. Mitchell Wilson is known for acting in The Wedding Banquet and Streamers, and for directing Teeth (2007), Happy Tears (2009), and Angelica (2015).

mentor:

Reginald Marsh

(14 March 1898 – 3 July 1954)

Reginald Marsh was an artist mostly known for his oil, watercolor, ink and ink wash works which depicted New York City life of the 1920s and 1930s.

teacher:

Frank Roos

teacher:

Hoyt L. Sherman

(1903–1981)

The studio that Roy Lichtenstein founded in 1994 at the Ohio State University was named in Sherman's honor, the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center. The first Lichtenstein's son middle name was "Hoyt."

colleague:

Allan Kaprow

(23 August 1927 – 5 April 2006)

A painter and assemblagist, Kaprow was one of those who stood at the origings of the concepts of performance art. He took part in the development of "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s and had an impact on Fluxus and installation art as well.

colleague:

George Segal

(26 November 1924 – 9 June 2000)

A sculptor and painter, Segal represented Pop Art and Environmental Art movements. He was primarily known for his life-size white plaster sculptures.

References

• Roy Lichtenstein The book examines the life and work of Roy Lichtenstein whose paintings of cartoon panels, advertisements, and other subjects from popular culture helped to establish Pop Art.
  2002
• Whaam! The Art and Life of Roy Lichtenstein The book illustrated with Lichtenstein's most famous artworks tells about the life of this great Pop Art painter. Susan Goldman Rubin evocatively explores the artist's work and life and his groundbreaking influence on the art world.
  2008
• Roy Lichtenstein. Drawing First: 50 Years of Works on Paper Written in close collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Estate and Foundation, this monograph presents an extraordinary selection of over 200 works on paper by the American artist, from the National Gallery of Washington, the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as public and private European and American collections.
  2015
• Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective High quality exhibition catalogue includes full color images from the exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein as well as detailed annotation and background on the pieces.
  2012
• Roy Lichtenstein: Between Sea and Sky The catalogue features a biography and chronology with rarely seen photographs of the artist at work in his various studios.
  2015
• Roy Lichtenstein: Times Square Mural In this appropriately oversized book, viewers get a glimpse of Lichtenstein's creative process, interweaving motifs, and visionary themes, and of the four decades of art making and rich associations that went into the making of the Times Square Mural.
  2003
• Roy Lichtenstein In Southampton, Lichtenstein works on an elaborate, 4-canvas composition The Artist's Studio. In conversation with the artist, critic Lawrence Alloway places Pop Art on a continuum of 20th century art that includes collage, Dada, and Purism in referring to signs and objects of contemporary society. Lichtenstein argues for distinctions between himself, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others.
  1975
• Roy Lichtenstein: How Modern Art was Saved by Donald Duck The book by art critic and broadcaster Alastair Sooke is a perfect introduction to the artist and his work. Spanning Lichtenstein's career, and explaining his unique style, it is a journey through the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.
  2013
• The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein: 1961-1986 An interview with Roy Lichtenstein.
  1987
• Roy Lichtenstein: Reflections A film directed by Edgar B. Howard and Seth Schneidman.
  1993
• Roy Lichtenstein: Tokyo Brushstrokes A film directed by Mark Trottenberg.
  1995