This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  From his studio in New York City, Roy Lichtenstein did cartoon inspired
paintings that helped launch the Pop Art movement. He was unique
in that he developed a new visual language in an avant-garde style that
was disruptive to viewers and yet was accessible and popular with
them. He also did innovative art work that incorporated many late
20th-century movements and addressed a number of social issues.
His
thirty-five year career of public recognition was celebrated in 1993-94
by curators of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York with a
large scale retrospective of his work.
He was born in
Manhattan and went to high school there. By age 14, he was taking
art classes at the Parsons School of Design and also studied briefly
with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in 1939. He then
attended Ohio State University where his major influence was Hoyt
Sherman, whose figure-ground relationships inspired Lichtenstein's
treatment of cliche subjects.
In 1943, he was drafted into the
Army and served in Europe and then returned to Ohio State, completing
his BFA and MFA and then teaching at that campus. From Cleveland,
Ohio, he made frequent trips to New York and started to exhibit there
in 1949. In the 1950s, he used various techniques of Abstract
Expressionism, did figurative work, and like many of his generation,
began employing pop art images. But he was searching for a style.
In
1957, he left Cleveland to teach in Oswego, New York, and in 1961, he
began teaching at Rutgers University, where one of his colleagues,
Allan Kaprow, used cartoon figures. Through Kaprow, he met many
renegade New York artists including Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine; it
was a circuitous return to the New York from where he had a long
journey.
In 1962, he had a landmark exhibition at the Castelli
Gallery that showed enlarged depictions of advertisements and comic
strip images. In fact, it was gallery owner Leo Castelli who, as
a major promoter of the contemporary art scene, was a key person in
launching his career.
Although Lichtenstein's pop paintings had
widespread popular acceptance, he began in 1965 to do Abstract
Expressionism, but in contrast to others in that style, he did work
that was hard and static. In the 1990s, he did large-scale
abstract interiors, and he also worked in ceramics and enamelled steel.
Throughout
his career, he appeared in many documentary films and did posters for
entertainments including Bill Clinton's United States presidential
campaign.
Lichtenstein's murals are in Dusseldorf, Germany; Tel Aviv, Israel; and
New York City. He died unexpectedly on September 30, 1997 from viral
pneumonia, having worked until the time of his death.
Sources include:
Art in America, "Roy Lichtenstein, 1923-1997"
Art in America, "Lichtenstein: Seeing Is Believing", Roni Feinstein
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Roy
Lichtenstein was born in New York City on October 27, 1923. His father,
Milton, was a real estate broker and his mother was a homemaker. He
grew up across Central Park from the Guggenheim Museum. He attended the
Franklin School for Boys, graduating in 1940. He studied under American
Social Realist painter Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League and
attended Ohio State University from 1940 through 1943. He returned
there in 1946 after having served in the armed services in Europe; he
received his Masters in Fine Arts in 1949. He taught at Ohio State
University until 1951; was Assistant Professor at New York State
University at Oswego and at Rutgers University in New Jersey until 1953.
Lichtenstein's
greatest successes came with Pop Art. He utilized blown-up comic
strips, including the dots necessary in commercial printing (Benday
dots) and the captions, which accompany comic strips. He has studied
drawing and painting and knew how to turn out the same kinds of works
that other painters did. His career is a contemporary inventory of
modern art historical styles: Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism,
Neo-Plasticism, Futurism, Expressionism, all leading to the Abstract
Expressionism on which he founded his own Pop work.
When he
was at Rutgers, he fell into a milieu that would galvanize the direction
of his art. He met Allan Kaprow and other artists, namely Claes
Oldenburg, Jim Dine, George Segal and Bob Whitman, whose
audience-participation performances came to be called Happenings.
Unlike many other artists, he had no idea what to do with a movie or
play, but he did enjoy what other people did with their Happenings.
In
1949, he married Isabel Wilson. They had two sons, David Hoyt and
Mitchell Wilson. They were divorced in 1965. In 1968 he married Dorothy
Herzka.
Lichtenstein died of pneumonia on Monday, September 29, 1997.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Obituary in Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, September 30, 1997
"A Few Good Colors Are Plenty" by Susan Morgan, Los Angeles Times Calendar Section, Sunday, January 30, 1994
"Wham! Blam! Pow! Roy Lichtenstein!" by Diane Waldman in ARTnews, November 1993
From the internet, artchive.com
Article by Peter Plagens in Newsweek Magazine, October 15, 1993
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Biography from Art Cellar Exchange:
|  Roy Lichtenstein is remembered as one of the 20th century's greatest and most influential artists. An excellent painter and sculptor, Lichtenstein was a pioneer whose unique visual language became the transitional voice between the modern and post-modern art movements of the late 20th century. Ruth E. Fine, Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings for the National Gallery of Art, distinguishes four areas of Lichtenstein's work that became "potent forces in late 20th Century art" :
1)the breakdown of barriers between art and life, using everyday objects and subjects appropriate to consumer culture,
2)an exploration of art based on other art,
3)an interest in serial imagery, and
4)participation in the untraditional medium of printmaking.
Born in New York City in 1923, Roy grew up in a city that epitomized the ideals and machinations of modernism. He therefore gained a unique understanding of the affects of modern life on the solitary soul, the group, and the society at-large.
Growing up during the depression years and coming of age at the start of World War II, he was greatly influenced by the jazz clubs of Harlem and the boxing matches and carnivals of Coney Island. At the age of 14, he began classes at Parson's School of Design, and at 16 he studied at the Art Students League under Reginald Marsh, and by 1940 he was enrolled as a painting major at Ohio State University, Columbus. His education was interrupted from 1943-1946 by a European tour of duty during World War II.
He began his artistic career as an abstract expressionist painter exploring the ideas of spontaneity and the "epoch of crisis" inherent in action painting. As America began to move past the effects of World War II and into prosperous times, art no longer needed to be an emotional reaction to the effects of nuclear war and industrialization. Instead, it became a commentary on American prosperity and the commercial boom that resulted from the war efforts. Roy Lichtenstein's paintings and prints are the embodiment of this change.
By 1961 Roy began to use objects and images from mass culture and advertising. He adapted painting techniques and imagery from comic strips, commercial printing, stenciling, and projected images. Good Morning, Darling, , Whaam! (1963), and Big Painting VI (1965) are among his most popular comic strip paintings. These blowups of the original cartoon were reproduced by hand and brought him unparalleled attention. His art consisted of black outlines, stripes, dots, brushstrokes, flat fields, foils, and patterns such as canvas weave and wood grain.
The idea of appropriating imagery from popular culture transformed Lichtenstein into a leader of the New York City based pop art movement along with artists like Andy Warhol. During this time he also produced elegant sculptures that revived earlier forms of the 1930s, as seen in his Modern Sculpture with Glass Wave(1967).
Roy Lichtenstein's Bull Profile Series is one of his most popular series of his lithographic works. Completed in 1973, Lichtenstein's purpose during this period was to explore the "progression of an image from representation to abstraction". To illustrate this progression, Roy's Bull unfolds in 7 different phases. Beginning with a monochromatic palette, he gradually breaks down the form into many geometrical compliments, he sections the picture plane using areas of color and diagonal lines. These shapes become more abstract until they are simply flat planes of color. Once the deconstruction of the Bull has been completed, Roy returns to the original form with a new interpretation in primary colors that are indicative of the pop-art movements re-interpretation of commercial art.
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Roy Lichtenstein is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Modernism
Sculptors
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