If you can name two of the most prominent Pop Artists of the early days of the Visual Arts Movement, those two names are almost certainly Andy Warhol and the subject of this post, Roy Fox Lichtenstein.
Born in 1923, Lichtenstein was brought up by relatively wealthy Jewish parents and doesn’t seem to have shown much artistic inclination until he had graduated from high school. He enrolled at the Art Students League of New York and was taught by Reginald Marsh, an artist who was known for his Paintings of New York and Coney Island.
Roy Lichtenstein
This period seems to have sparked his enthusiasm as he then enrolled at Ohio State University for a degree in fine arts. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 and, following the cessation of conflict, completed his degree at Ohio, partly under the supervision of Hoyt L. Sherman. It was Sherman’s ‘flash room’ technique (flashing an image onto a screen briefly and asking his student to copy it) which is thought to have influenced Lichtenstein’s future work.
After graduation Lichtenstein stayed on at Ohio to take part in the graduation programme and become an art instructor. While he was working at Ohio he held his first exhibition 1951 at the Carlebach Gallery in New York. This was a relatively impoverished period for Lichtenstein and it lasted until the early 1960s. He took a number of different non-painting jobs to make ends meet while back in the studio he was experimenting with Expressionism and Cubism.
Drowning Girl (1963)
New Jersey’s Rutgers University was where he took a teaching job in 1960 and also where he met Allan Kaprow, a pioneer of Performance Art and another heavy influence on Lichtenstein’s work. It was in 1961 that Lichtenstein began to produce the work with which we are now familiar; cartoon prints and commercially-influenced work. The critiques of consumerism in his work at this stage unmistakably overlaps that of his contemporary, Andy Warhol. Drowning Girl (1963) is one of the best known pieces of art from this period.
Lichtenstein’s star rose incredibly quickly in 1961 and his work began to be featured at New York’s Castelli Gallery. A one-man exhibition followed in 1962 at which every piece of work was bought before it even opened. As his domestic and international fame grew in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein packed in his teaching job at Rutgers and moved to New York to paint full time.
Whaam (1963)
Perhaps his most famous work is one that now hangs in the Tate Modern in London. Whaam (1963) is taken from a DC Comics strip called American Men of War and uses the Magna acrylic resin paint which Lichtenstein favoured. Whaam is also a good example of why Lichtenstein courted some controversy for this type of work. To all intents and purposes these comic strip panels just appeared to be copies of the originals and by 1965 he had pretty much finished with this phase of his work. Jack Cowart, of the Liechtenstein Foundation, defends the work as follows: “Roy’s work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy.” Most importantly, Lichtenstein saw the creative process in his own process – he seemed unconcerned whether or not anyone else saw it that way.