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Roy Lichtenstein

1923 –1997

Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American Pop artist and his paintings, prints and sculptures were heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described Pop Art as ‘not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting.’ Some of Roy Lichtenstein’s best known works include WHAAM!, Drowning Girl, Kiss, BLAM, As I Opened Fire, Brushstroke and POW!

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York as the son of a realtor and a housewife and, next to Andy Warhol, he is considered as the great artist of the Pop Art movement. Roy Lichtenstein was a Pop Art painter whose works, in a style derived from comic strips, portray the trivialisation of culture endemic in contemporary American life. Using bright, strident colours and techniques borrowed from the printing industry, he ironically incorporated mass-produced emotions and objects into highly sophisticated references to art history.

Roy Lichtenstein worked a lot with stencils, thus producing rows of oversized dots that should make his paintings or prints look like a huge mass publication product. Although he prepared and executed his works painstakingly like the old masters, he wanted his works of art to look machine made. One of his peculiarities was that he did not want his brush strokes to be seen.

The most famous Lichtenstein image is arguably WHAAM!, one of the earliest known examples of Pop Art, adapted from a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War. The image depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering ‘WHAAM!’ and the boxed caption ‘I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky...’

His painting Torpedo...Los! sold at Christie's for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time, making him one of only three living artists to have attracted such huge sums. In 2005, In the Car was sold for a then record $16.2m and his cartoon-style 1964 painting Ohhh . . . Alright . . . was sold at a record US $42.6m at a sale at Christies in New York, 2010.

The work of Roy Lichtenstein is held in many notable museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery, London.  In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. became the largest single repository of the artist's work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books.

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