Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 into an upper-middle-class New York City family, and attended public school until the age of 12. He then enrolled at Manhattan's Franklin School for Boys, remaining there for his secondary education. Art was not included in the school's curriculum; Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby. He was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would frequently draw portraits of the musicians playing their instruments.
Lichtenstein then 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 and after World War II between 1943 and 1946. Lichtenstein returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the army under the G.I. Bill. Returning to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who 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 1949 Lichtenstein received a M.F.A. degree from the Ohio State University and in the same year married Isabel Wilson.
He moved to Cleveland in the same year. His work at this time fluctuated between Cubism and Expressionism. In 1954 his first son, David Hoyt Lichtenstein, was born. He then had his second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein in 1956. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style.
In 1961 Lichtenstein began his first Pop Art paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965 and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey (1961; National Gallery of Art). This piece 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, eh, Dad?" In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York. Lichtenstein had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened.
It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. Also featuring thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."
Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. More often than not they were making no attempt to be positive. Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument". His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London).
In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic and over 300 prints - mostly in screenprinting. 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. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation. He died of pneumonia in 1997 at New York University Medical Center. He was survived by his second wife Dorothy and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage. The DreamWorks Records logo was his last completed project. More information can be found at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Information gathered from Wikipedia.
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