Roy Lichtenstein Totally Explained

Everything about Roy Lichtenstein totally explained

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (27 October 1923 – 29 September 1997) was a prominent American pop artist, his work heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He himself described Pop art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".

Early years

Roy Lichtenstein was born on 27 October 1923 into an upper-middle-class New York City family, and attended public school until the age of 12. He then enrolled at Manhattan's Franklin School for Boys, remaining there for his secondary education. He was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. After graduation from Franklin, Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.
Lichtenstein then left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. Returning to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who 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 1949 Lichtenstein received a M.F.A. degree from the Ohio State University and in the same year married Isabel Wilson (divorced 1965). Wilson was previously married to Cleveland, Ohio artist Michael Sarisky. In 1951 Lichtenstein had his first one-man exhibition at Carlebach Gallery in New York. In 1954 his first son, David Hoyt Lichtenstein was born. He then had his second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein in 1956. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting.

Rise to fame

Lichtenstein began teaching in Upstate, New York at State University of New York at Oswego in 1958. However, the brutal upstate winters were taking a toll on him and his wife.
In 1960, he started teaching at Rutgers University where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, also a teacher at the University. This environment helped to 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 Benday 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 or cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York, and he'd 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. Interestingly Castelli rejected the work of one of Lichtenstein's contemporaries, Andy Warhol. In September 1963 he took a leave of absence from his teaching position at Douglass College at Rutgers.

Fame

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 paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Also featuring thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they'd 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." Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it's important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. More often than not they were making no attempt to be positive. Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "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. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument".
   His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War. The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a 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).
   In 1967 his first museum retrospective exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. Also in this year his first solo exhibition in Europe was held at museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hannover. He married his second wife, Dorothy Herzka in 1968.
   In the 1970s and 1980s, his work began to loosen and expand on what he'd 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.
   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 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 1997

Relevance to modern day culture

The Pop art culture is still connected very much to life in the Twenty First Century. Lichtenstein's work as well as contemporaries such as Warhol hold relevance today and many of the messages portrayed can be directly linked to modern day life. An example of this continuing relevance is the use of Lichtenstein's and Warhol's images in U2's 1997, 1998 Pop Mart tour and an exhibition in 2007 at the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom).

Awards

1995 National Medal of the Arts, Washington D.C.
1995 Kyoto Prize, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan.
1993 Amici de Barcelona, from Mayor Pasqual Maragall, L’Alcalde de Barcelona.
1991 Creative Arts Award in Painting, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
1989 American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy. Artist in residence.
1979 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.
1977 Skowehegan Medal for Painting, Skowehegan School, Skowehegan, Maine.

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