Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

Roy Lichtenstein, who was born in 1923 in New York City, has said that he owes his style to comics, but not his themes.

Lichtenstein studied with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York while still in high school. While there he painted street scenes, Coney Island vistas and Bowry tableaux. Lichtenstein also painted his favourite jazz musicians who habituated the jazz clubs on 52nd Street and the Apollo theatre in Harlem. After graduating from high school he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University. In 1943 he was drafted into the Army and after the war returned to his studies at Ohio State.

After graduation Lichtenstein worked in an abstract mode, both geometric and Cubist-inspired, but throughout the fifties he dabbled with pre-Pop imagery. He created works in a loose, Abstract Expressionist style with imagery including a lithograph of a ten dollar bill, Disney characters and the theme of the Old West. His paintings and drawings in the early fifties were parodies of American twenties' art, e.g. Remington's cowboy-and-Indian scenes.

He was appointed assistant Professor of Art at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1960. He met Allan Kaprow there and attended "Happenings" staged by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Robert Whitman. Lichtenstein originally produced Abstract Expressionist paintings but changed his style around 1960. This period inspired him to begin his series of comic strip paintings from 1961, which pursued contemporary cultural imagery. Lichtenstein left teaching in 1964 to paint full-time.

Lichtenstein is famous as a Pop artist for his use of images of romance, science fiction, and violent militaristic images from comic-strips. Lichtenstein made high art out of comic strips, as was the dogma of the Pop artists. He took powerful imagery and refined them to be presented in a new way.

Since the sixties, Lichtenstein has retained his stark, mechanical methods of interpreting scenes or objects, but has applied his visual wit and unerring eye to a vast array of subjects, provoking confrontations between "credited" and "discredited" styles and subjects. Lichtenstein's pictures aim to de-individualise and objectify emotions and gestures. Lichtenstein's canvases are painted in a way so as to make them look printed. He did this by colouring his images with meticulously reproduced enlarged dots, this was a large scale replication of the printing process used to produce modern colour publications. For Lichtenstein the imagery is in part a strategy, a means of binding together the picture surface. Another aim can be seen most clearly in the series of 'Brushstrokes': meticulous, frozen versions (in comic-strip technique) of the marks with an Abstract Expressionist artist might have made with one sweep of the brush. The series is an experiment in 'removal': a word which crops up fairly often in Lichtenstein's discourse. It also attempts to make the audience question its own values. They appear perfect and anonymous, as if made by a graphic designer. Lichtenstein's approach is analytical; he aims to show painting as it is, or can be: the art of transforming something real into a deliberately artificial and yet trivial language. Lichtenstein realised that it is only our critical intelligence which separated the classical picture of the past from those of the present. Lichtenstein's interest in the modern cliché, for instance, had been an attempt to show the mythological status, or classicism, of the "hot dog".

He embodied some of the most salient and essential qualities of Pop sensibility in his 1962, 1963 and 1964 exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, USA. He had his first one man exhibition in Europe at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris, France. He was given his first American retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland. In 1964 architect Philip Johnson commissioned Lichtenstein (and Warhol, Indiana, Chamberlain and Rauschenberg) to produce large format paintings for the New York State Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York, USA.

During his development as an artist, Lichtenstein returned repeatedly to investigate new ways of determining the relationship between the subject matter and techniques of painting, of finding a balance between intuition and ideas; he thus enabled his own style to stand out all the more clearly against the background of art history.

Examples of Lichtenstein's works include 'Girl with Ball' 1961 and 'M-Maybe (A Girl's Picture)' 1965.

Lichtenstein gives back to mass society its own standardised and superficial structures of experience and perception in the form of challenging and inquiring paintings which say nothing, and which in doing so, say everything.

Lichtenstein died on September 29th, 1997 in New York at age 73 from pneumonia.

A Summary of Lichtenstein's major style, Pop Art, is included.

This Biography was written by myself.
Please feel free to use this as a resource, not an assignment.
If you have any questions, suggestions or further information please email me.

Bibliography

Hopwood, G., 'Handbook of Art', North Clayton; The Specialty Press, 1979.
Gardner, H., 'Art Through The Ages', New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Williams, D. and Wilson B. V., 'From Caves To Canvas, An Introduction To Western Art', Sydney; McGraw-Hill, 1992.
Lucie-Smith, E., 'Movements in Art Since 1945', London; Thames and Hudson, 1983.
Osterwold, T., 'Pop Art', Berlin; Taschen, 1990.

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