Roy Lichtenstein. Modern art Poster. 1967. Screenprint, composition: 8 x 10 7/8" (20.3 x 27.6 cm); sheet: 8 x 10 7/8" (20.3 x 27.6 cm). Ruth Vollmer Bequest

“Although almost anything seemed to be fair subject matter for art... commercial art and particularly cartooning were not considered to be among those possibilities.”

Roy Lichtenstein

A key figure in the Pop art movement and beyond, Roy Lichtenstein grounded his profoundly inventive career in imitation—beginning by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles, and art history itself. Referring to Lichtenstein’s equalizing treatment of the subjects he chose for his art, Richard Hamilton, a fellow Pop artist, wrote in 1968: “Parthenon, Picasso or Polynesian maiden are reduced to the same kind of cliché by the syntax of the print: reproducing a Lichtenstein is like throwing a fish back into water.”1

Lichtenstein later recalled that 1961, the year he completed Girl with Ball, marked a break with both his own abstract style and “prevailing taste” in the art world. “Although almost anything seemed to be fair subject matter for art,” he recalled, “commercial art and particularly cartooning were not considered to be among those possibilities.”2 The figure from Girl with Ball came from a printed advertisement for the Mount Airy Lodge, in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, and he based another painting, Drowning Girl, on a comic book cover. In these two paintings and throughout his other work, Lichtenstein would copy the source image by hand, adjusting its composition to suit his narrative or formal aims, and then trace this altered sketch onto the canvas, aided by a projector.

In this rigorously manual process, he used perforated templates to replicate and often exaggerate the dot patterning commonly used in printing imagery. Known as Ben-Day dots, this patterning became a signature element of his style, which incorporated the look of mechanical reproduction into the fine-art world of painting. His transformations of the source image typically included reducing the color palette to saturated primaries, eliminating incidental details, heightening contrasts, and “emphasizing the pictorial clichés and graphic codes of commercially printed imagery.”3 In Drowning Girl, for example, Lichtenstein cropped out much of the original scene and modified the statement in the text bubble, amplifying this image of a damsel in distress.

Lichtenstein soon turned his attention from the clichés of commercial print culture to the aesthetic clichés of high art.4 With bold, graphic simulations of brushstrokes in prints like Brushstroke and Brushstrokes, for example, he parodied the autographic mark-making of Abstract Expressionism. Yet where Jackson Pollock had been seen to imbue his skeins of paint with a bravura energy and force, Lichtenstein turned that device into something clichéd, commercial, and reproducible. “Visible brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture; but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of a grand gesture,” he later said.5

Art history proved an enduringly rich field for Lichtenstein’s transformations. Concurrent with his Brushstrokes series were explorations of the landscape genre and, in 1969, two volleys at Claude Monet. Monet had also worked serially, devoting multiple canvases to a sustained study of the changing sun as it moved across the facade of the Rouen Cathedral or haystacks in a field. With his Cathedral Series and Haystack Series, Lichtenstein reprised those motifs in his signature Ben-Day dots, making Impressionism, in his words, “industrial.”6 In Artist's Studio “The Dance”, Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) fills the back of a studio suffused with additional references to the artist, from the lemons (a favored motif) to the blanched driftwood (echoing the dancers’ sinewy bodies) to the musical notes streaming in the open window. In other paintings from this series, Lichtenstein included reproductions of his own work, beginning a lasting practice of self-quotation.

In 1992, Lichtenstein expanded his representational system into a room-sized canvas, Interior with Mobile. Painted in almost exclusively primary colors outlined in solid black, with space described in planes of unmodulated color, stripes, and Ben-Day dots, it was relentlessly flat, yet large enough to walk into—an artificial space that pretended, through its size, to be real. Throughout his career, Lichtenstein confounded such oppositions—between reality and artificiality, high art and mass culture, abstraction and figuration, and the manual and mechanical—to reveal their interdependence.

Natalie Dupêcher, independent scholar, 2018

  1. Richard Hamilton, “Roy Lichtenstein,” Studio International (January 1968): 23.

  2. Roy Lichtenstein, “A Review of My Work Since 1961—A Slide Presentation” (1995), reprinted in Roy Lichtenstein, ed. Graham Bader (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 58.

  3. James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff, “Introduction,” in Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, exhibition catalogue), 22.

  4. Carolyn Lanchner, Roy Lichtenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 5.

  5. Roy Lichtenstein, “A Review of My Work,” 61.

  6. Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in John Coplans, “Interview: Roy Lichtenstein” (1970), in Roy Lichtenstein, ed. Graham Bader, 36.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960's, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, 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. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". Lichtenstein described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Whaam!, Drowning Girl, and Look Mickey proved to be Lichtenstein's most influential works. His most expensive piece is Masterpiece, which was sold for $165 million in 2017.
Wikidata
Q151679
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Roy Lichtenstein attended classes at the Parsons School of Design and Art Students League before enrolling in the Fine Arts program at Ohio State in 1940. He was drafted into the United States Army, but was discharged and returned to Ohio in 1946 to finish his master's degree. In 1957 he accepted a teaching position at the State University of New York in Oswego, all the while pursuing his art career and gradually shifting his focus towards Expressionism. He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960, and by 1961, he had created his first paintings of cartoon and comic strip icons with his trademark use of Benday dots. By 1964, Lichtenstein was one of Pop art's most recognized, yet controversial, artists.
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Decorative Painter, Cinematographer, Designer, Jewelry Designer, Decorative Artist, Graphic Artist, Painter, Sculptor
Names
Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Fox Lichtenstein
Ulan
500013596
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

155 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Being Modern: Building the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
  • Roy Lichtenstein Paperback, 48 pages
  • The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
  • The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
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