Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was an American Pop Artist. His career spanned over four decades, beginning in the mid-1950s and ending with his death in the late 1990s. His artistic style was heavily influenced by the comic strip, advertising, imitation, documentation, and parody. In his paintings, Lichtenstein attempted to emulate the same look achieved by the printing process, with images composed of rows of tiny coloured dots that, at a distance, make up a large-scale image of a person, object, or scene. He completed a number of commissions throughout his career, and his work has been displayed and collected on an international scale.
Born on October 27, 1923, Roy Fox Lichtenstein was exposed to art from an early age. Lichtenstein’s mother, Beatrice (1896–1991), introduced him and his sister Rénee to the world of art through visits to local museums. In 1940, Lichtenstein graduated from the Franklin School for Boys and then studied life drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York over the summer. That same year, he began his schooling at Ohio State University in the College of Education. During the following three years, he began to question popular artistic canons, critiquing notions of what makes a piece of art worthy of inclusion in the canon.
In 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted into the American infantry and was deployed to Europe in 1945. After World War Two, he made his way to Paris, intending to study at the Sorbonne. However, he never completed his studies there as his father’s illness saw his return to New York in 1946. After his father’s death, Lichtenstein returned to Ohio State University to finish his Bachelor of Fine Arts. He then became an instructor at Ohio State while simultaneously working on his master’s degree, which he obtained in 1949.
In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s success as an artist began to grow. At this time, he began to incorporate his criticisms of uniqueness, authenticity, and artistic taste into his artwork. He questioned why commercial art was seen as subpar to the Abstract Expressionist art of the previous decade.
His new position at Douglass College (Rutgers University’s women’s college) as an assistant professor began in 1960. This opportunity connected Lichtenstein with New York’s many museums and galleries. This, alongside influences from his new colleagues at Douglass College, led Lichtenstein to lean into a style he had only dabbled in previously; that of imitations of cartoon characters against abstract backgrounds, rather than traditional figuration. As he developed this style, he began to use Benday dots, a process commonly used in printing that that uses small dots to compose an image. This later became Lichtenstein’s identifying style that linked him to the Pop Art movement.
In 1964, the artist resigned from his post at Douglass College to focus on his artistic practice. He moved beyond the world of comic strips and advertisements as subjects of imitation in his artwork and began to turn his attention towards oil paintings from artists such as Picasso and Cézanne. His style also became less figurative and more abstract in the latter half of the 1960s. Over the next three decades, Lichtenstein would experiment with forms, colours, and ideas, critiquing even the brushstroke, one of the essential tools of Western art. He placed forms in dialogue with each other, created new forms, and expanded his colour palette beyond its original red, white, blue, yellow, black, and green. He also completed various sculpture commissions in cities such as Barcelona, Singapore, Miami Beach, and Columbus. After decades of artistic experimentation, Lichtenstein contracted pneumonia and died from complications on September 29, 1997, in New York City.