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| c1949 Roy Lichtenstein in Columbus, Ohio |
Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York. In 1939 he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the College of the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an MFA in 1949. In 1951 the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organised a solo exhibition of his semiabstract paintings of the Old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family.
From 1957 to 1960 Lichtenstein obtained a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego. By then he had begun to include loosely drawn cartoon characters in his increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960 to 1963 he lived in New Jersey while teaching at Douglass Residential College, a division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He met artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert Whitman, all of whom were experimenting with different kinds of art based on everyday life. In 1961 he began to make paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Benday-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons; he also started cropping images from advertisements. From 1964 into the next decade, he successively depicted stylized landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of paintings by famous artists, geometric elements from Art Deco design (in the Modernseries), parodies of the Abstract Expressionists’ style (in the Brushstrokes series), and explosions. They all underlined the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface.
In the early 1970s he explored this formal question further with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. From 1974 through the 1980s, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series Interiors, which included images of his own works as decorative elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist also explored other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminium, brass, and serigraphs.
Beginning in 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Lichtenstein participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honored with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively. The artist was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, three years before his death on September 30, 1997.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
This is part 1 of a 20-part series on the works of Roy Lichtenstein (works 1940-1952):
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| 1940 ( Paul Bunyan ) ink on paper |
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| 1940 Self-Portrait ink and crayon on paper 29.8 x 22.2 cm |
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| 1942 ( Reclining Woman ) oil on canvas 76.2 x 63.8 cm |
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| 1943 ( Portrait of a Man ) oil on canvas 80.6 x 60.3 cm |
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| 1943 Untitled ink on paper 25.9 x 21.6 cm |
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| 1944 ( A London Park ) conte crayon on support 28.2 x 25.4 cm |
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| 1946 Head carved stone 12.7 x 17.8 x 15.2 cm |
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| 1947 Figures coloured pencil on paper 22.4 x 30.4 cm |
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| 1947 Head watercolour on paper 17.6 x 14.2 cm |
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| 1947 Standing Figure terracotta 26.7 x 9.2 x 17.8 cm |
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| 1947 Two Figures watercolour (or gouache ) and charcoal on paper 90 x 55 cm |
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| 1947 Untitled wood relief 24.4 x 34 cm |
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| 1947 Wrestler oil on paper 57.8 x 42.5 cm |
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| 1948 Alice in Wonderland oil on pasteboard 40.4 x 50.8 cm |
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| 1948 Battle Scene pastel on paper 48.5 x 64 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA |
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| 1948 Mother and Child oil on paper 40.5 x 50.5 cm The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA |
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| 1948 Pilot pastel on black construction paper 26.7 x 34.9 cm |
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| 1948 The Angel oil ( and gouache? ) on canvas-board 45.7 x 35.5 cm |
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| 1948 The Combat pastel 41.3 x 61.9 cm |
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| 1948 The Cook pastel 45 x 40.5 cm |
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| 1948 The Musician oil and graphite on canvas 45.5 x 40.5 cm |
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| 1948 The Racing Car pastel, gouache and ink on paper 28.2 x 46.4 cm |
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| 1948 Untitled ( Six Figures ) coloured pastels on unprimed muslin 67.9 x 45.1 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
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| 1948 Untitled ( Woman in the Garden ) oil on canvas 31.1 x 35.6 cm |
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| 1949 Beauty and the Beast I oil on linen 66 x 81.5 cm |
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| 1949 Sea Coast oil on canvas 30.5 x 35.6 cm |
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| 1949 Storming the Castle etching, aquatint and engraving on cream wove paper 29.9 x 39.6 cm |
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| 1949 The Bird oil on canvas 45.7 x 61 cm |
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| 1949 The Philosophers oil on canvas-board 50.2 x 38.4 cm |
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| 1949 Untitled oil on canvas ( or canvas-board ) 48.3 x 61 cm |
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| 1949 Untitled oil on canvas |
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| 1949 Untitled oil on canvas-board 40.6 x 51.1 cm |
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| 1950 ( Two Figures with Hats ) acrylic on gessoed Masonite 30.5 x 40.6 cm |
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| 1950 Insect with Man oil on linen 33 x 38.1 cm |
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| 1950 Man on Lion oil on canvas 40.8 x 35.7 cm |
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| 1950 The Charioteer gouache, gold-bronze paint, graphite and black ink on paper 45.4 x 61.3 cm |
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| 1950 The Hero's Return oil on canvas 35.6 x 52.1 cm |
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| 1950 The Horse wood and metal 18.4 x 31.1 x 5.1 cm |
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| 1950 The Owl woodcut on paper 19.7 x 27.9 cm |
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| 1951 ( Head ) III oil on canvas 40.7 x 30.5 cm |
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| 1951 Death of the General oil on canvas 86 x 101.6 cm |
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| 1951 Exhuming the Mastodon oil on canvas 91.5 x 106.7 cm |
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| 1951 Last of the Buffalo oil on linen 50.8 x 61.3 cm |
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| 1951 The End of the Trail oil on canvas 40.6 x 61 cm |
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| 1951 The Indians oil on canvas 50.8 x 45.8 cm |
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| 1951 Washington Crossing the Delaware I oil on canvas 66 x 81.3 cm |
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| 1951 Washington Crossing the Delaware II oil on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm ( see below ) |
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| 1951 Washington 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze oil on canvas 149 x 25 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| 1952 ( Two Chippewa Building Canoe ) oil on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm |
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| 1952 Chief Before the Teepee oil on canvas 102.6 x 76.2 cm |
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| 1952 Indian with Bird I oil on canvas 40.6 x 51.1 cm |
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| 1952 Indians Pursued by American Dragoons - After Wimar oil on canvas 91.4 x 106.7 cm ( see below ) |
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| n.d. Indians Pursued by American Dragoons by Carl Wimar |
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| 1952 The Explorer oil on canvas 40.6 x 35.6 cm |
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| 1952 Two Sioux oil on canvas 76.2 x 56 cm |