Roy
Lichtenstein
b. 1923, New York City; d. 1997, New York City
Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City. In 1939
he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York,
and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the School of Fine Arts at
Ohio State University, 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 M.F.A. in 1949. In 1951 the Carlebach Gallery, New York,
organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract 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 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, who were all
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 and 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 Modern series), 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, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs.
From 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.
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