Referring to Lichtenstein’s equalizing treatment of the subjects he chose for his art, Richard Hamilton, a fellow Pop artist, wrote in 1968: “Parthenon, Picasso or Polynesian maiden are reduced to the same kind of cliché by the syntax of the print: reproducing a Lichtenstein is like throwing a fish back into water.” 1 commercial art and particularly cartooning were not considered to be among those possibilities.”Ī key figure in the Pop art movement and beyond, Roy Lichtenstein grounded his profoundly inventive career in imitation-beginning by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles, and art history itself. Photo © Tate, 2011.“Although almost anything seemed to be fair subject matter for art. The exhibition in Chicago and Washington is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities. Annual support pro¬vided by the Exhibitions Trust: Goldman Sachs, Kenneth and Anne Griffin, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, the Trott Family Foundation, and the Woman's Board of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sacks.Īdditional support provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation. Major funding for the exhibition catalogue is generously provided by Kenneth and Anne Griffin and Cari and Michael J. Major funding is provided by the Bette and Neison Harris Exhibitions Fund. Sponsorsīank of America is the Global Sponsor of Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective. Roy Lichtenstein traveled from Chicago to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in the fall of 2012 and then to Tate Modern, London in early 2013. The exhibition was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London. CatalogueĪ major catalogue accompanied the exhibition and featured new scholarship by an international team of distinguished curators, critics, and art historians including James Rondeau, Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair and Curator, Department of Contemporary Art, and Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator at Tate Modern, London. In restating the mass-produced image by means of an insistently handmade, painterly process, he confounded the notion of the readymade and forever expanded and altered our understanding of how a painting can be made, how it should look, and how we define the artist in our society. Impeccable sleight of hand is Lichtenstein's revolutionary stance. Ultimately, there is a profound radicalness in his project, more extreme than the initially transgressive embrace of pop culture. More than 50 years after his opening salvo, his work seems wiser than ever in its insistence on the authority of the artificial. The tactile sites-in print media-from which Lichtenstein's art emerged are growing progressively extinct. Subsequently, he traced the drawing onto canvas, continuing to make compositional adjustments, and then painted the work, sometimes with the aid of assistants. He then sketched the image, recomposing it to suit narrative clarity or formal ends. The artist almost always began with a two-dimensional source, often a comic image or another readily distillable form of printed mass communication. After 1966 he applied his comic style to a broad range of found imagery. The first phase of Lichtenstein's mature career was defined by his 'cartoon' mode. Plastic values such as beauty and balance were of primary importance to Lichtenstein, and reliable formal tropes-outlines, halftone dots, and solid diagonals-were the building blocks of nearly all his compositions. The idea of compositional unity was central to the artist's thinking.

His contribution-the still-potent collision of commercial sources and fine art-defined the enduring legacy of Pop Art.

Lichtenstein is a figure of monumental importance in the recent history of art. It was the first major retrospective to broadly examine his art since his death. This exhibition on the art of Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997) included nearly 170 works made between 19, focusing on the artist's achievements in painting, sculpture, and drawing.

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