Roy Lichtenstein

Milton Lichtenstein sold real estate and the family lived comfortably on the Upper West Side. Roy attended public school until he was 12, then the Dwight School, and spent his adolescence at the Apollo in Harlem drawing the musicians while they played. The summer before his last year of school he took classes at the Art Students League under Reginald Marsh. Ohio State followed, then three years in the Army from 1943, where the language program, the engineering program and pilot training were each cancelled in turn, leaving him to serve as an orderly, a draftsman and an artist. He came home to see his father dying, took his discharge with the G.I. Bill, finished a master's at Ohio State in 1949 and married Isabel Wilson the same year.

Then a decade of not much: window decorating and drafting in Cleveland, teaching at Oswego, Cubism and Expressionism and a late conversion to Abstract Expressionism. Rutgers and Allan Kaprow changed that in 1960. By his own telling, one of his sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic and bet his father could not paint that well, and the result in 1961 was Look Mickey, his first picture built from hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots reproduced by hand. Leo Castelli started showing him that year. The 1962 solo exhibition sold out before it opened. Whaam! and Drowning Girl came in 1963, and he quit teaching in 1964. Brushstrokes turned the same deadpan on Abstract Expressionism in 1965. He was still going at 70, installing a 53-foot enamel mural in Times Square in 1994.

Life ran a piece in 1964 headed Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.? and critics called the paintings vulgar and empty. That argument he won. The other one is open. The panels he enlarged had been drawn by working comic artists — Irv Novick, Tony Abruzzo, Russ Heath, Jack Kirby, Jerry Grandenetti — who were not consulted, not credited and not paid. Lichtenstein said he was nominally copying but really restating the copied thing in other terms. Asked in 2013 whether the man was a plagiarist, the comics artist Dave Gibbons answered copycat, and said the label ought to read after Irv Novick. Art Spiegelman said he did no more and no less for comics than Warhol did for soup. His foundation's director answers that scale, color, treatment and implication all changed and that no exact copy exists.

He died on September 29, 1997 at 73, of pneumonia, at New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for weeks. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was set up in 1999, and in 2011 its board stopped authenticating work, judging that the lawsuits cost more than the service was worth. In 2012 it located Electric Cord, missing since 1970. Masterpiece, painted in 1962, sold privately in 2017 for a reported 165 million dollars, the proceeds directed to criminal justice reform. The Postal Service put five of his paintings on stamps for his centennial in 2023. The men who drew the original panels are still not on the wall labels.

Roy Lichtenstein's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Look Mickey artwork
  His first painting using hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots. National Gallery of Art 1961
• Whaam! artwork
  A four-metre diptych after Irv Novick. Bought by the Tate in 1966 1963
• Drowning Girl artwork
  Taken from a panel in DC's Secret Hearts No. 83, drawn by Tony Abruzzo. Now at MoMA 1963
• Brushstrokes artwork
  Abstract Expressionist gesture rendered in mechanical dots 1965
• Mural with Blue Brushstroke artwork
  Five storeys of it in the atrium of the Equitable Center, New York 1985
• Times Square Mural artwork
  Fifty-three feet of enamel on metal for the subway station 1994

• 1939 aged ~16 Studies under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League
• 1943 aged ~20 Enters the Army, where three training programs are cancelled under him He served instead as an orderly, a draftsman and an artist.
• 1949 aged ~26 Takes an MFA at Ohio State and marries Isabel Wilson
• 1960 aged ~37 Starts teaching at Rutgers and meets Allan Kaprow
• 1961 aged ~38 Paints Look Mickey and is picked up by Leo Castelli
• 1962 aged ~39 His first one-man show at Castelli sells out before it opens
• 1964 aged ~41 Life asks whether he is the worst artist in the United States He resigned from Rutgers the same year to paint full time.
• 1994 aged ~71 Installs the Times Square Mural, 53 feet of enamel on metal
• September 29, 1997 aged 73 Dies of pneumonia at 73

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. fellow Pop painter
• Jasper Johns b. 1930
  Painter and printmaker whose Flag and Target paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. precursor
• Robert Rauschenberg 1925–2008
  Mixed-media artist whose Combines broke down boundaries between painting and sculpture. precursor
• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. source of his first Pop subject
• Keith Haring 1958–1990
  Street artist whose bold, cartoon-like figures addressed social issues and brought art to public spaces. successor in the street
• Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–1988
  Neo-expressionist painter who rose from graffiti artist to one of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s. successor in the street