Roy Lichtenstein: 1997

Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 is a focused exhibition highlighting rarely seen works from the last year of the pioneering Pop artist ’s life. This exhibition runs in conjunction with the major exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: Like New , presented on the Museum’s 5th floor. Echoing and expanding on key throughlines from the larger exhibition, Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 includes prints, photographs, and sculptural maquettes along with drawing and collage studies for a number of unrealized projects.

The exhibition demonstrates the incredible vitality of Lichtenstein’s vision and his restless pursuit of new ideas five decades into his career. While the artist is often associated with his works of the 1960s and 1970s, Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 offers fresh insight into the range of the artist’s late experimentation and his response to the advent of the digital age.

Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 is organized by David Crane, Curatorial Research Associate, and Nakai Falcón, Curatorial Assistant.

About the artist

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American artist. A leading figure of the Pop Art movement, he is best known for his large-scale paintings inspired by comic books, advertisements, and mass-produced imagery. Lichtenstein's art is represented in major museum collections worldwide, and he remains one of the most influential and recognizable artists of the 20th century.

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.