Roy Lichtenstein



Biography of Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), in the company of the fellow artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, became a leading figure in the new art movement. Roy Lichtenstein is one of the most important celebrities of the Pop Art history. He expressed pop art as a parody. He defined it as industrial painting and was always inspired by advertisements and comic strips.

Roy Lichtenstein

In 1940s Lichtenstein exposed his paintings in galleries through the whole nation. In1950s he used to take his artistic subjects from American history and folklore and mythology. By the time, Lichtenstein took influences from the recent success of abstract expressionism (Pollock and Willem de Kooning). He took directly the images from comic books and advertises and expressing emotional life in his art.

New York pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, were the first to incorporate into their paintings commercial advertisements extracted from popular culture and mass media.


Roy Lichtenstein Artwork

The most typical picture from that period is Whaam!. Roy Lichtenstein painted this picture in 1963 and a comic book panel from DC Comics’ All-American Men of War inspired him. By the mid-1960s everybody recognized him nationally as a leader in the Pop Art movement. In addition, by the late 1960s, Lichtenstein did not use anymore comic book sources. By 1970s he created paintings which referred to the art of masters like Salvador Dalí, Picasso or Henri Matisse. In the 1980s and 1990s, he painted modern house interiors and mirror reflections in a cartoon style.

In conclusion, the most famous Roy Lichtenstein’s artworks are M-Maybe, Drowning Girl, Popeye, and Whaam!. One of his most influential works is Look Mickey. Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece was sold for $165 million in 2017 and this price was believed to make it among the 10 most expensive paintings ever sold.


Roy Lichtenstein’s contribution to Pop Culture

Roy Lichtenstein, one of the most famous Pop Artists, and Pop Culture achieved to create a great composition on a derivate art base based on comic books. Moreover, he used the images from mass-produced pictures books to apply techniques that he develops to create his paintings.

Nurse by Roy Lichtenstein
Nurse by Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein and dots contribution

He not only used the outlines and colors as popular art, but he also used the Ben-Day dots to contribute his innovation. This dots were small and use in comics of mass –manufactured to render in color. By focusing on a comic strip, starting from a single panel, the pop art canvas from Lichtenstein are not the exact facsimile. However, Roy reimagines the creativity of the composition of the elements. It must be added or eliminated and in addition editing the text. The artist’s blurred the differentiation between high art and the mass reproduction by recreating comic book scenes by hand-painting.

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