53 Facts About Roy Lichtenstein

1.

Roy Lichtenstein's work defined the premise of pop art through parody.

2.

Roy Lichtenstein's work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style.

3.

Roy Lichtenstein described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".

4.

Roy Lichtenstein's paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

5.

Roy Lichtenstein was born into an upper middle class German-Jewish family in New York City.

6.

Roy Lichtenstein's father, Milton, was a real estate broker, his mother, Beatrice, a homemaker.

7.

Roy Lichtenstein was raised on New York City's Upper West Side and attended public school until the age of twelve.

8.

Roy Lichtenstein then attended New York's Dwight School, graduating from there in 1940.

9.

Roy Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby, through school.

10.

Roy Lichtenstein was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

11.

Roy Lichtenstein frequently drew portraits of the musicians playing their instruments.

12.

Roy Lichtenstein then left New York to study at Ohio State University, which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts.

13.

Roy Lichtenstein's studies were interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army during and after World War II between 1943 and 1946.

14.

Roy Lichtenstein returned 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.

15.

Roy 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.

16.

In 1949 Roy Lichtenstein received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University.

17.

In 1951, Roy Lichtenstein had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery in New York.

18.

Roy Lichtenstein moved to Cleveland in the same year, where he remained for six years, although he frequently traveled back to New York.

19.

Roy Lichtenstein's second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was born in 1956.

20.

Roy Lichtenstein began teaching in upstate New York at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1958.

21.

In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing.

22.

Roy 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.

23.

Roy Lichtenstein moved back to New York to be at the center of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers University in 1964 to concentrate on his painting.

24.

Roy Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl, which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts No 83, drawn by Tony Abruzzo.

25.

Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, Roy Lichtenstein's work tackled the way in which the mass media portrays them.

26.

Roy Lichtenstein's work was harshly criticized as vulgar and empty.

27.

Roy Lichtenstein began experimenting with sculpture around 1964, demonstrating a knack for the form that was at odds with the insistent flatness of his paintings.

28.

Roy Lichtenstein then applied a glaze to create the same sort of graphic motifs that he used in his paintings; the application of black lines and Ben-Day dots to three-dimensional objects resulted in a flattening of the form.

29.

Roy Lichtenstein's works based on enlarged panels from comic books engendered a widespread debate about their merits as art.

30.

Journal founder, City University London lecturer and University College London PhD, Ernesto Priego notes that Roy Lichtenstein's failure to credit the original creators of his comic works was a reflection on the decision by National Periodical Publications, the predecessor of DC Comics, to omit any credit for their writers and artists:.

31.

Jean-Paul Gabilliet has questioned this account, saying that Roy Lichtenstein had left the army a year before the time Novick says the incident took place.

32.

In 1966, Roy Lichtenstein moved on from his much-celebrated imagery of the early 1960s, and began his Modern Paintings series, including over 60 paintings and accompanying drawings.

33.

Roy Lichtenstein continued to revisit this theme later in his career with works such as Bedroom at Arles that derived from Vincent van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.

34.

In 1970, Roy Lichtenstein was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to make a film.

35.

Also in 1970, Roy Lichtenstein purchased a former carriage house in Southampton, Long Island, built a studio on the property, and spent the rest of the 1970s in relative seclusion.

36.

Roy Lichtenstein produced a series of "Artists Studios" which incorporated elements of his previous work.

37.

Roy Lichtenstein began to produce works that borrowed stylistic elements found in Expressionist paintings.

38.

Also in the late 1970s, Roy Lichtenstein's style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow.

39.

In 1983 Roy Lichtenstein made two anti-apartheid posters, simply titled "Against Apartheid".

40.

In 1969, Roy Lichtenstein was commissioned by Gunter Sachs to create Composition and Leda and the Swan, for the collector's Pop Art bedroom suite at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz.

41.

In 1994, Roy Lichtenstein created the 53-foot-long, enamel-on-metal Times Square Mural in Times Square subway station.

42.

Roy Lichtenstein served on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

43.

In 1949, Roy Lichtenstein married Isabel Wilson, who previously had been married to Ohio artist Michael Sarisky.

44.

Roy Lichtenstein died of pneumonia on September 29,1997 at New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for several weeks, four weeks before his 74th birthday.

45.

Roy Lichtenstein was survived by his second wife, Dorothy Herzka, and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage.

46.

Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are celebrated for exploring the relationship between fine art, advertising, and consumerism.

47.

Roy Lichtenstein's work Crying Girl was one of the artworks brought to life in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

48.

Roy Lichtenstein later participated in documentas IV and VI in.

49.

Roy Lichtenstein had his first retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969, organized by Diane Waldman.

50.

In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC became the largest single repository of the artist's work when Roy Lichtenstein donated 154 prints and 2 books.

51.

Outside the United States and Europe, the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection has extensive holdings of Roy Lichtenstein's prints, numbering over 300 works.

52.

Between 2008 and 2012, following the death of photographer Harry Shunk in 2006, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the collection of photographic material shot by Shunk and his Janos Kender as well as the photographers' copyright.

53.

In 2006, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation published an image of the painting on its holiday greeting card and asked the art community to help find it.