The Whitney Visual Explorer

Artist Biennial

Roy Lichtenstein

1923–1997

466 works in the collection 28 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

Alongside Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein was a key figure of Pop art, a movement that emerged in the early 1960s and was distinguished by subject matter derived from pop culture and the use, or imitation, of mechanical reproduction techniques such as screenprinting. Lichtenstein studied art briefly with the Social Realist painter Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York and then at Ohio State University, from which he received undergraduate and MFA degrees. In 1961 he arrived at his signature aesthetic: works whose subjects were loosely derived from comic strips, cartoons, or advertisements, painted in a style that mimicked commercial printing.

In Girl in Window, a study for a mural commissioned by the architect Philip Johnson for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Lichtenstein represented the half figure of a comely female through a combination of simplified passages of solid color, bold black outlines, and areas of gridded dots. Yet his technique is more labor intensive, and manual, than his coolly detached surfaces—and their allusion to industrial reproduction—suggest. His process involved first sketching his selected subject, then projecting the drawing using an opaque projector, tracing the image onto canvas and, finally, filling in the outline with contours and dots, which were applied with a stencil to emulate the Benday dots of halftone printing processes. 

In the mid-1960s Lichtenstein began to take the artist’s mark itself as a motif: Little Big Painting pictures the slashing brushwork and drippy runoff that characterized many an Abstract Expressionist canvas. Lichtenstein parodies this means of improvisatory mark making, and its associations with spontaneity and freedom, by rendering the strokes as if stylized and premeditated—substituting the look of anonymous commercial production for the uniqueness of the artist’s gesture.

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 230.

Works in the collection

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Exhibitions at the Whitney