Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997) was an American 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 basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. 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. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots was Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). This piece 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, eh, Dad?" In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons. 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 1961-1962 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. 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. 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 #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." By the late 1960s, Lichtenstein had stopped using comic book sources. In the 1970s his focus turned to creating paintings that referred to the art of early 20th century masters like Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Salvador Dalí. In the 1980s and '90s, he also painted representations of modern house interiors, brushstrokes and mirror reflections, all in his trademark, cartoon-like style. He also began working in sculpture. In the 1980s, Lichtenstein received several major large-scale commissions, including a 25-foot-high sculpture titled "Brushstrokes in Flight" for the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio and a five-story-tall mural for the lobby of the Equitable Tower in New York. Lichtenstein was committed to his art until the end of his life, often spending at least 10 hours a day in his studio. His work was acquired by major museum collections around the world, and he received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1995. Source: Wikipedia, http://www.biography.com/people/roy-lichtenstein-9381678?page Born: New York, NY: (1923 - 1997) Education: Arts Students League, NY, 1939; Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, BFA, 1946, MFA 1949 Teaching: Instructor, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 1946-51; Instructor, State University of Oswego, 1957-60; Instructor, Douglas college, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 1960-63 Awards: Kyoto Prize, Inamori Fund, Creative Art Award, Japan's Highest Lifetime Achievement Award, $530,000, 1995 Recent Exhibitions: Guggenheim Museum, NY, 1993, Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada, 1993; Guggenheim Museum, NY, 1993-94; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Canada 1994;Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, CA, 1994; University of California, Irvine Fine Art Gallery, CA, 1994; California State University, Long Beach, CA, 1994,95; State University of New Stanford University, T.W. Stanford Art Gallery, CA, 1994,95; Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 1994,95; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, 1994,95; Dallas Museum of Art, TX, 1995; Clark College, Index Gallery, Vancouver, WA 1995 Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, Y: Tate gallery, London, England; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Pasadena Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

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