Roy Lichtenstein’s Life, Works and Success Story

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

–Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein’s Back story

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on the 27th of October, year 1923 in Manhattan, New York City in an upper-middle class family. He was the son Beatrice and Milton Lichtenstein, a real estate broker. In his junior years, Roy became fascinated with art and his hobbies were drawing, painting and designing. He had his secondary education at Manhattan’s Franklin School for Boys and nurtured his creativity by taking water color lessons at Parsons School of Design.

Following graduation, Lichtenstein took summer classes at the Art Students League of New York with mural painter Reginald Marsh in 1939. He studied college at Ohio State University.  However in 1943, he stopped and served his country during World War II in the army from 1939-1945.

He finished his bachelor of fine arts degree in Ohio State University at 1946 and finished his masters of fine arts degree 1949. He became an educator at Ohio State University until 1951. In 1957, he taught at Oswego State College in New York.

In 1960, Lichtenstein moved New Jersey at teach at Rutgers University. In the same year, Roy Lichtenstein was challenged by his son upon seeing a Mickey Mouse comic book and said that he cannot paint as good as the one in the comic book. He may have turned this challenge an inspiration because in 1961, he created six paintings featuring popular characters from comic- strips. He also produced different images for advertisement illustrations and ordinary object such as hotdogs, pies, curtains, kitchen, golf balls and other common stuffs.

After three years, he decided to stop teaching and made painting his new profession. During this time, the first devices that he used became his trademark which was speech balloons, lettering and Ben Day Dots.

In the 1960’s, Lichtenstein started painting large-scale murals. In his work Yellow landscape in 1965, he explored the use of Ben-Day dots and used solid bold colors to portray landscapes. Roy Lichtenstein also created ceramic sculptures and sculptural animal figures and surprisingly produced a series of paintings which differs from the Abstract Expressionist’s use of the brushstroke.

Lichtenstein was known for using popular images with ironic twist and paintings based on comic strips often with the idea of passion, romance, violence, war and the like.

The year of 1967 was fruitful for Roy Lichtenstein, his first museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art museum in California and he also had solo exhibition in European cities like Amsterdam, London, Hannover and Bern.

In the 1970s, he was inspired by Modern masters to create works with textures and materials. Sculptures, particularly the use of bronze are important focus during this time. Lichtenstein produced large, painted sculptures of everyday objects such as lamps, pitchers and steaming coffee cups and made sculptures of some notable public sculptures in metal and plastic.

In 1977, he was commissioned by Giant Company BMW to do a painting of one of its model cars BMW 320i. Lichtenstein’s last complete project was the DreamWorks Records logo.
Lichtenstein died of Pneumonia in 1997 at the age of 73.