Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein: The Hand That Pretended to Be a Machine

One of his sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic in 1961 and issued the challenge that reorganized twentieth-century painting: "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" Lichtenstein was thirty-seven, a late-arriving Abstract Expressionist teaching at Rutgers, with a decade of unremarkable Cubist and Expressionist canvases behind him. He painted *Look Mickey* — flat, outlined, dotted, deadpan — and within a year Leo Castelli's gallery had sold out his first solo show before it opened.

Upper West Side to Ohio

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, to an upper-middle-class German-Jewish family: his father Milton a real estate broker, his mother Beatrice Werner a homemaker. He grew up on the Upper West Side, attended public school until twelve, then the Dwight School, graduating in 1940. He was a serious jazz enthusiast who went up to the Apollo in Harlem to sketch musicians. In the summer of 1939 he took classes at the Art Students League under Reginald Marsh, and went on to Ohio State University for a fine arts degree.

Three years of Army service from 1943 to 1946 interrupted him. Enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program, he ended up serving as an orderly, draftsman and artist, with a brief spell at the Sorbonne in 1945. Back at Ohio State on the G.I. Bill under the mentorship of Hoyt L. Sherman — a debt he later repaid by naming a studio there after him — he took his master's in 1949 and taught at OSU on and off for roughly a decade.

The Long Apprenticeship

Almost nothing about the next decade suggested what was coming. His first solo show came at New York's Carlebach Gallery in 1951. From 1951 to 1957 he lived in Cleveland, alternating between Cubism and Expressionism, and had two sons, David in 1954 and Mitchell in 1956. Returning to upstate New York in 1957 and teaching at SUNY Oswego from 1958, he took up Abstract Expressionism rather late in its life — and began, tellingly, to hide Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny inside his abstractions. At Rutgers from 1960 he fell in with Allan Kaprow, and the proto-Pop instinct came fully awake.

The Dots

The signature technique was an act of laborious impersonation: Lichtenstein hand-replicated Ben-Day dots, the mechanical screen used in cheap commercial color printing, in oil and Magna, an early acrylic. The paradox is the whole point. A machine process, executed by hand, at mural scale, slowly. He connected it directly to the painters he was displacing: the Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done... 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."

He chose his subjects for maximum voltage. "I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong — usually love, war, or something highly charged," he said, so that the material would fight his "removed and deliberate painting techniques." *Whaam!* (1963), a diptych 1.7 by 4 metres of a fighter firing a rocket into a red-and-yellow detonation, is the extreme case: catastrophe rendered with the affect of a paint chart. Tate bought it in 1966 and still shows it. *Drowning Girl* (1963), lifted from DC Comics' *Secret Hearts* No. 83, drawn by Tony Abruzzo, hangs at MoMA.

"Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?"

That was *Life* magazine's headline in 1964, and it was not eccentric. Serious people thought the work was a con. Lichtenstein's answer went to the heart of it: "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."

After the Comics

He left the comics behind quickly and never stopped rebuilding. From 1966 the Modern Paintings series, more than sixty works, put Ben-Day dots to Art Deco architectural motifs; the Modern Sculpture series followed in 1967–68. He had begun sculpture in 1964 with ceramic pieces like *Head of Girl*. The Brushstrokes series, from 1965, rendered the gestural mark itself — Abstract Expressionism's sacred signature — as a printed cartoon. Then Mirrors from 1969, Entablatures in the seventies, Still Lifes, Surrealist-Pop, Reflections, Interiors drawn from furniture advertisements, Landscapes in the Chinese Style, and the Nudes of the nineties. He made over 300 prints, mostly screenprints, and monumental public work: *Brushstrokes in Flight* (1984) at the Columbus airport, *Mural with Blue Brushstroke* (1984–85) at New York's Equitable Center, the fifty-three-foot *Times Square Mural* (1994). In 1977 BMW had him paint a racing 320i for its Art Car project.

He married Isabel Wilson in 1949 and divorced in 1965, married Dorothy Herzka in 1968, and from 1970 divided his time between Manhattan and a Gin Lane carriage house in Southampton.

Why Roy Is Called a Genius

The faculty is easy to underrate because the result looks so simple: an editor's eye at the level of the single decision. Lichtenstein did not photocopy panels. He changed scale, cropping, color, line weight and wording, and those adjustments are the work — the difference between a throwaway frame of newsprint and a painting that holds a museum wall from thirty feet. Jack Cowart of his foundation puts the defense plainly: "Panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and implications. There is no exact copy." The foundation calls him "one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century." Formal recognition followed: the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979, the National Medal of Arts and Japan's Kyoto Prize both in 1995, the first living artist given a solo drawings show at MoMA in 1987.

The counter-case is not a technicality, and it has never gone away. The artists whose panels he mined — Russ Heath, Irv Novick, Tony Abruzzo, Jerry Grandenetti — went uncredited, poorly paid and largely unknown, partly because DC's predecessor withheld artist credits as a matter of policy. Their compositions made his paintings possible; his paintings made fortunes. Art Spiegelman's verdict is the sharpest: "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup." Dave Gibbons proposed the obvious remedy, borrowed from music: "*WHAAM!* by Roy Lichtenstein, after Irv Novick." And the money has a certain irony — *Nurse* fetched $95.4 million in 2015, *Masterpiece* $165 million in 2017 — for a body of work premised on the disposable.

Legacy

Lichtenstein died of pneumonia on September 29, 1997, at seventy-three, after weeks in the NYU Medical Center. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, founded in 1999, has since donated the vast Shunk-Kender photographic archive to five institutions and, in 2011, judged the risks of authenticating works to outweigh the benefits and stopped. A 2012–13 retrospective travelled from the Art Institute of Chicago to the National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou; the Postal Service issued Lichtenstein stamps in 2023. Roughly 4,500 works circulate. He took the ugliest, cheapest visual language America produced and proved it could carry the weight of painting — a claim that remains, depending on where you stand, either the great democratic gesture of postwar art or its most profitable theft.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts
• Notable work: Girl with Ball
• Notable work: Girl with Hair Ribbon
• Notable work: Takka Takka
• Affiliated with Rutgers University
• Educated at Ohio State University, Art Students League of New York and Ohio University
• Worked as painter, sculptor and university teacher