Roy Lichtenstein Biography (1923-1997) Roy Lichtenstein was born October 27, 1923, in New York City. In 1939, he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an M.F.A. in 1949. In 1951, the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract paintings of the old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family. From 1957 to 1960, Lichtenstein obtained a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego. By then, he had begun to include loosely drawn cartoon characters in his increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in New Jersey while teaching at Douglass College, a division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He met artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert Whitman, who were all experimenting with different kinds of art based on everyday life. In 1961, he began to make paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Benday-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons; he also started cropping images from advertisements. From 1964 and into the next decade, he successively depicted stylized landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of paintings by famous artists, geometric elements from Art Deco design (in the Modern series), parodies of the Abstract Expressionists’ style (in the Brushstrokes series), and explosions. They all underlined the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface. In the early 1970s, he explored this formal question further with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. Beginning in 1974 and up to the 1980s, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series of Interiors, which included images of his own works as decorative elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist has also explored other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs. From 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Lichtenstein participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honored with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively. The artist was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, three years before his death September 30, 1997. Notes: 1923 Oct. 27. Roy Fox Lichtenstein is born in Manhattan 1937 Roy Lichtenstein enrolls in Saturday morning watercolor classes at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan 1940 Roy begins studies in fine arts at Ohio State University and takes first drawing classes with Prof. Hoyt L. Sherman. 1942 Lichtenstein makes paintings that are copies of works by Picasso (such as Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906) and Georges Braque. 1943 He is drafted into U.S. Army; he is inducted at Fort Dix in New Jersey. He enters engineering A.S.T.P. (Army Special Training Program) at De Paul University in Chicago, where he takes classes in math and science for two semesters before army cancels the program. 1944 Roy arrives at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, for its pilot-training program. Due to the enormous number of casualties in the Battle of the Bulge and the consequent need for soldiers to replace them, the program is terminated. 1945 Roy's division is shipped to Great Britain, lateron to Germany. During his time in the service, Roy Llichtenstein draws landscapes and portraits of soldiers and other people in his sketchbooks. 1946 Roys father dies. Later, Roy returns to Ohio State University to complete his degree, he attends painting classes. Roy joins Fine Arts department as an instructor. His work at the time is based on American genre paintings, with recognizable subject matter, but the form is Cubist with Expressionist overtones. 1948-1949 Roy produces pastels, oils, and drawings. Subjects include musicians and landscapes. Begins using fairy tales as subjects, and includes references to "Beauty and the Beast" and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 1949 Marriage with Isabel Wilson (whom he had met earlier at the Ten-Thirty Gallery in Cleveland, where she is co-director). Roy works at various jobs, most lasting about six months each, including: teaching drawing at the Cooper School, a commercial-art school; working as an engineering draftsman at Republic Steel; decorating display windows part-time at Halle's Department Store; drawing black-and-white dials for Hickok Electrical Instrument Company; making project models at an architecture firm. 1951 First solo exhibition in Manhattan 1956 Roy Lichtenstein creates a lithograph called Ten Dollar Bill, his first proto-Pop work, in an edition of 25. 1961 paints Look Mickey, the first painting in which he directly appropriates a cartoon or a panel from a comic strip. It contains his first use of Benday dots (applied with a plastic-bristle dog-grooming brush dipped in oil paint) and his first use of a dialogue balloon, as well as obvious pencil marks. Begins to stencil dots onto canvas using a roller to distribute paint over a handmade metal screen and then a small scrub brush to push paint through. 1964 Life magazine publishes an article on Roy Lichtenstein, asking "Is he the worst artist in America?" Roy replaces store-bought metal screens (to apply dots) with paper screens-which he has made especially for him-and uses them exclusively from then on. 1965 Roy divorced from Isabel, who receives custody of the children. 1974 Lichtenstein begins to paint his first works influenced by Italian Futurism. Begins using metallic colors and mixing sand with paint to highlight surface texture. 1979 Begins German Expressionist-inspired works based on paintings and woodcuts by artists such as Erich Heckel, Franz Marc, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. (less known...) 1997, September 29. Roy Lichtenstein dies at New York University Medical Center in Manhattan from complications due to pneumonia.

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