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Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 - September 29,
1997) was a prominent United States|American pop
artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular
advertising and comic book styles, which he
himself described as being "as artificial as
possible." 

==Biography==
===Early years===
Born into a middle class family in 1923 in New
York City, he attended public school until the age
of 12, before being enrolled into a private
academy for his secondary education. The academy
did not have an art department, and he became
interested in art and design as hobby outside of
his schooling. He was an avid fan of Jazz and
often attended concerts at the Apollo Theater in
Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the
musicians at their instruments. During 1939, in
his final year at the academy, he enrolled in
summer art classes at the Arts Students League in
New York under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.

On graduating in 1940, Lichtenstein left New York
to study at the Ohio State University which
offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts.
His studies were interrupted by a three year stint
in the army during World War II. He returned to
his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his
teachers at the time, Hoyt L. Sherman, 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 1951 he had his first one-man
exhibition at a gallery in New York, the
exhibition was a minor success.
He moved to Cleveland in 1951, where he remained
for six years, doing jobs as various as draftsmen
to window decorator in between periods of
painting. His work at this time was based on
cubist interpretations of other artist’s
paintings such as Frederic Remington.
In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and
began teaching again. It is at this time that he
adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late
convert to this style of painting; he showed his
work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.

He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960
where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow,
also a tutor at the University.
His first work to feature the large scale use of
hard edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey
(1961, National Gallery, Washington DC). In the
same year he produced six other works with
recognizable characters from gum wrappers or
cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying
Lichtensteins work at his gallery in New York, and
he had 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. Finally making enough money to live
from his painting, he stopped teaching in the same
year.

===Mature Style===
Using oil and Magna paint his best known works,
such as Drowning Girl (1963, Museum of Modern Art,
New York), feature thick outlines, bold colors and
Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if
created by photographic reproduction. Rather than
attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work
tackles the way mass media portrays them.

His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963,
Tate Gallery, London), one of the earliest known
examples of pop art, featuring a fighter aircraft
firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a
dazzling red and yellow explosion. The cartoon
style is heightened by the use of the
onomatopoeia|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 (5'7" x 13'4").

Most of his best-known artworks are relatively
close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels,
a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would
occassionally incorporate comics into his work in
different ways in later decades.) These panels
were originally drawn by lesser known comic book
artists such as Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv
Novick, and Jerry Grandinetti, who rarely received
any credit. Artist Dave Gibbons, said of
Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies
of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat,
uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated
images."  In response to complaints like that of
Gibbons, Lichtenstein's obituary in The Economist
noted these artists "did not think much of his
paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they
became static. Some threatened to sue him...But
this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein's
achievement. His was the idea. The art of today,
he told an interviewer, is all around us."

During the seventies and eighties, his work began
to loosen and expand on what he had 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 Centre, Minneapolis)
which incorporates five other previous works,
fitted into the scene.

In the late seventies this style was replaced with
more surreal works such as Pow Wow (1979, Ludwig
Forum fĂĽr 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.

His painting Torpedo...Los! sold at Christie's for
$5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time,
one of only three artists to have attracted such
huge sums for art produced within the artists
lifetime.

In 1995 Lichtenstein was awarded the Kyoto Prize
from the Inamori Foundation in Kyoto, Japan

In 1996 The National Gallery in Washington DC
became the largest single repository of the
Artists 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 at New York
University Medical Center. Twice married, he was
survived by his wife, Dorothy, who he wed in 1968
and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his
first marriage.

==Quotes==

"We like to think of industrialization as being
despicable. I don't really know what to make of
it. There’s something terribly brittle about it.
I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree
with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump,
but signs and comic strips are interesting as
subject matter. There are certain things that are
usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art.
We're using those things – but we're not really
advocating stupidity, international teenagerism,
and terrorism." - Roy Lichtenstein

==External links==

* http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/ Roy
Lichtenstein Foundation
*
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/L/lichtenstein.ht
ml The Art Archive
*
http://davidbarsalou.homestead.com/LICHTENSTEINPRO
JECT.html Side by side comparisons of
Lichtenstein's works with the originals drawn by
other artist (the originals are on the left)

===Selection of galleries showing Lichtenstein's
work===

*http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/psearch?Request=A&Pers
on=224210 National Gallery, Washington DC (USA)
*http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroup
id=999999961&artistid=1508&page=1 Tate Modern (UK)
*http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/# Frankfurt Museum of
Modern Art (D)
*http://collections.walkerart.org/item/agent/4
Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (USA)
*http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php
?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3542&page_number=1&template
_id=6&sort_order=1 New York Museum of Modern Art
(USA)
*http://www.stedelijk.nl/oc2/page.asp?PageID=150
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL)
*http://www.museenkoeln.de/english/museum-ludwig/d
efault.asp Ludwig Museum, Cologne (D)
*http://www.castelligallery.com/current/index.html
Castelli Gallery, New York (USA)
*http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_w
orks_88_0.html Guggenheim Museum, New York (USA)
*http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/viewOne.asp
?dep=21&viewMode=0&item=1980%2E420 Metropolitan
Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA)
*http://search.sfmoma.org/search/?sp-f=ISO-8859-1&
sp-c=9&sp-a=sp10026505&sp-p=all&sp-q=lichtenstein&
sp-k=Collections&sp-i=1 San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, San Francisco (USA)
*http://hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/search.asp?Art
ist=Lichtenstein&Page=1&ViewMode=2 Hirshhorn
Museum, Washington DC (USA)
*http://www.mam.org/collections/contemporaryart_de
tail_lichtenstein.htm Milwaukee Art Museum,
Milwaukee (USA)

==Further reading and viewing==

*Roy Lichtenstein - Janis Hendrickson - ISBN
3-8228-0281-6
*The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein : A Catalogue
Raisonne 1948-1997 - Mary L Corlett  - ISBN
1555951961
*Roy Lichtenstein (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 1)
- Lawrence Alloway  - ISBN 0896593312
* Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Chris Hunt  -
DVD and VHS  - Image Entertainment 1991
* Roy Lichtenstein Interview with Melvyn Bragg -
VHS Cat No. PHV6019

==Citations==
Commonscat|Roy Lichtenstein
*
http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion.php?id=5&oid=9
"Historically, copying the Masters was considered
to be a part of the painter’s training, not the
final product" by Rian Hughes, Eye Magazine
*
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id
=S%26%29H%2C%2DRQ%2F%2A%0A Obituary in the The
Economist|Economist (subscription required)

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