Roy Lichtenstein
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Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible."
Born into a middle class family in 1923 in New York City, he attended public school until the age of 12, before being enrolled into a private academy for his secondary education. The academy did not have an art department, and he became interested in art and design as hobby outside of his schooling. He was an avid fan of Jazz and often attended concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the musicians at their instruments. During 1939, in his final year at the academy, he enrolled in summer art classes at the Arts Students League in New York under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.
On graduating in 1940, 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. He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his teachers at the time, Hoyt L. Sherman, is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York, the exhibition was a minor success. He moved to Cleveland in 1951, where he remained for six years, doing jobs as various as draftsmen to window decorator in between periods of painting.
His work at this time was based on cubist interpretations of other artist’s paintings such as Frederic Remington. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It is at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting; he showed his work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.
He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960 where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, also a tutor at the University. His first work to feature the large scale use of hard edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery, Washington DC). In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching in the same year.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roy Lichtenstein".
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