58 Facts About Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein rose to prominence in the 1960s through pieces which were inspired by popular advertising and the comic book style.

Roy Lichtenstein's paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, which represented him from 1961 onwards.

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

Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27,1923, into an upper middle class German-Jewish family in New York City.

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

Roy Lichtenstein was raised on New York City's Upper West Side and attended public school until he was 12.

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

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

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

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

In 1939, his last year of high school, Roy Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Roy Lichtenstein's second son, Mitchell Lichtenstein, was born two years later.

In 1957, Roy Lichtenstein moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again.

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

In 1960, Roy Lichtenstein started teaching at Rutgers University where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, who was a teacher at the university.

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.

In September 1963, Roy Lichtenstein took a leave of absence from his teaching position at Douglass College at Rutgers.

Roy Lichtenstein's works were inspired by comics featuring war and romantic stories.

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.

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.

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

When Roy Lichtenstein's work was first exhibited, many art critics of the time challenged its originality.

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

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.

For Head of Girl, and Head with Red Shadow, Roy Lichtenstein collaborated with a ceramicist who sculpted the form of the head out of clay.

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.

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

City University London lecturer 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:.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

In 1991, Roy Lichtenstein began an affair with singer Erica Wexler who became the muse for his Nudes series including the 1994 "Nudes with Beach Ball".

On September 29,1997, Roy Lichtenstein died of pneumonia at New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for several weeks, at age 73.

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

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

Roy Lichtenstein later participated in documentas IV and VI in.

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

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 two books.

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.

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 collaborator Janos Kender as well as the photographers' copyright.

In October 2012, Roy Lichtenstein's painting Electric Cord was returned to Leo Castelli's widow Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, after having been missing for 42 years.

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.