Roy Lichtenstein
1923 -1997
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was the most sophisticated American pop artist, who featured art that drew on popular culture for style and subject matter. He contemplated visual standards in popular comic books, advertisements, movies, television, interpreting ironically past artistic styles. By his impersonal style which tends to subdue emotional content, Roy Lichtenstein appears as the authority of the stereotype.
Lichtenstein was born on 27 October 1923 in New York City. He enrolled at the Franklin School for Boys, in Manhattan, for his secondary education. An avid fan of jazz, he often attended their concerts and draw portraits of the musicians. After he graduated at the academy, Lichtenstein left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II between 1943 and 1946. He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war.
In 1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York. His work at this time was based on cubist interpretations of other artist's paintings such as Frederic Remington. In 1957 he began teaching in New York again. It is at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, as a late convert to this style. He showed his work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.
He began teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in 1960 and became close friend with Allan Kaprow, who was also a tutor at the University. Kaprow encouraged him to give up abstraction and return to comic-book imagery. He was producing simple stripe paintings using a stain technique inspired by the work of Helen Frankenthaler. New style featured heavy outlines and the Benday dots used to add tone in printing. He experimented with a number of approaches to popular imagery, even attempting, to apply a gestural style to cartoon characters, including Bugs Bunny.
The most famous of these early works, is "Oh, Jeff…I Love You Too...But…", was based on romance comics. "Look Mickey", came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said: 'I bet you can't paint as good as that.' In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. That made the drastic change in Lichtenstein's career.
He continued in this seam for much of his career, recognizable by their comic-strip characteristics. Later he extended this manner into sophisticated and provocative ideas on art and popular culture. His works began to include variety of new themes such as still lives and landscapes, with new use of brushstroke. That was a dramatic departure from his earlier style.
He died of pneumonia in 1997 in New York.
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