ROY LICHTENSTEIN

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'Roy Fox Lichtenstein' (27 October 1923 – 29 September 1997) was a prominent American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible".

Contents

Early years

Rise to fame

Fame

Selection of museums showing Lichtenstein's work

References

External links

Further reading and viewing

Early years

Roy Lichtenstein was born on 27 October 1923 into an upper-middle-class family in New York City,^[1] and attended public school until he was 12. He then enrolled at the Franklin School for Boys, in Manhattan, for his secondary education.¹ The school did not have an art department, and he became interested in art and design as hobby outside of his schooling. He was an avid fan of jazz and often attended concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the musicians at their instruments.^[2] During 1939, in his final year at the academy, he enrolled in summer art classes at the Art Students League of New York under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.^[3]
On graduating in 1940, Lichtenstein left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts.¹ His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II between 1943 and 1946.¹ He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his teachers at the time, Hoyt L. Sherman, is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). 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 1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York.¹
He moved to Cleveland in 1951, where he remained for six years, although frequently traveling to New York, doing jobs as various as draftsman to window decorator in between periods of painting.¹ His work at this time was based on cubist interpretations of other artist's paintings such as Frederic Remington.
In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It is at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting; he showed his work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.

Rise to fame

He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960 where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, also a tutor at the University.^[4] His first work to feature the large scale use of hard edged figures and Benday Dots was ''Look Mickey'' (1961, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota), which came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; 'I bet you can't paint as good as that.'² In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching a year later.

Fame

Using oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as ''Drowning Girl'' (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York), feature thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackles the way mass media portrays them. When his work was first released, many art critics of the time wrote about the originality. More often than not they were making no attempt to be positive.
His most famous image is arguably ''Whaam!'' (1963, Tate Modern, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapts a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' ''All-American Men of War''.^[5] The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a dazzling red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoetic lettering ''"WHAAM!"'' and the boxed caption ''"I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..."'' This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13 ft 4 in).
Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic-book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by such comics artists as Jack Kirby and DC Comics artists Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Artist Dave Gibbons said of Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated images". Lichtenstein's obituary in ''The Economist'' noted these artists "did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some threatened to sue him...But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein's achievement. His was the idea. The art of today, he told an interviewer, is all around us". Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a copyist, saying "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."^[6]

During the 1970s and 1980s, his work began to loosen and expand on what he had done before. 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. In the late 1970s, this style was replaced with more surreal works such as ''Pow Wow'' (1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen).
In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic including some notable public sculptures such as ''Lamp'' in St. Mary’s, Georgia in 1978, and over 300 prints, mostly in screenprinting.^[7]
His painting ''Torpedo...Los!'' sold at Christie's for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time, making him one of only three living artists to have attracted such huge sums.
In 1995 Lichtenstein was awarded the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation in Kyoto, Japan.
In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC became the largest single repository of the artist's work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation. He died of pneumonia in 1997² at New York University Medical Center. Twice married, he was survived by his wife, Dorothy, whom he wed in 1968, and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage. The DreamWorks Records logo was his last completed project.

Selection of museums showing Lichtenstein's work

★ Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY (USA)

★ Artworks, Los Angeles (USA)

★ National Gallery, Washington DC (USA)

★ Tate Modern (UK)

★ Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art (D)

★ Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (USA)

★ New York Museum of Modern Art (USA)

★ Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL)

★ Ludwig Museum, Cologne (D)

★ Castelli Gallery, New York (USA)

★ Guggenheim Museum, New York (USA)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA)

★ San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (USA)

★ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (USA)

★ Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (USA)

★ Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa (USA)

★ Arts on the Point, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts (USA)

References

1. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation - Chronology Clare Bell
2. Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists, , Edward, Lucie-Smith, Thames & Hudson, ,
3. Coplans, John. Roy Lichtenstein. (New York: Praeger, 1972.
4. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation - Excerpt from Michael Kimmelman's ''"PORTRAITS, Talking with Artists at the Met, The Modern, The Louvre and Elsewhere"'' Michael Kimmelman
5. Tate Collection: ''Whaam!'' by Roy Lichtenstein
6. Lichtenstein: creator or copycat?
7. Corlett, Mary Lee. The prints of Roy Lichtenstein, a catalogue raisonné, 1948-1997 2nd ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002).

External links

★ Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

★ Roy Lichtenstein Image Duplicator

★ The Art Archive: Roy Lichtenstein

★ Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein (sources for Lichtenstein's comic-book paintings)

★ ''Eye'' (Spring 2001): "Historically, copying the Masters was considered to be a part of the painter’s training, not the final product", by Rian Hughes

Further reading and viewing

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein'' by Janis Hendrickson - ISBN 3-8228-0281-6

★ ''The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonne 1948-1997'' by Mary L. Corlett - ISBN 1-55595-196-1

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 1)'' by Lawrence Alloway - ISBN 0-89659-331-2

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Chris Hunt'' Image Entertainment video, 1991

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Melvyn Bragg'' video

★ ''Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963'' - Ed. Joan Marter - ISBN 0-8135-2609-4

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein's ABC's'' by Bob Adelman - ISBN 978-0821225912

★ ''Roy Lichtenstein Drawings and Prints '' 1970 Chelsea House publishers, introduction by Diane Waldman''