A child's taunt about Mickey Mouse launched Roy Lichtenstein's Pop Art
In 1961 one of Roy Lichtenstein's sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic and bet his father couldn't paint that well. The result, Look Mickey, used hard outlines and hand-painted printing dots, and it set a middle-aged art teacher on the path to becoming one of Pop Art's defining figures.
Born in New York City on October 27, 1923, Lichtenstein grew up on the Upper West Side, loved jazz and sketched musicians at the Apollo Theater. He studied at Ohio State University, where the teacher Hoyt L. Sherman shaped his thinking, served in the Army from 1943 to 1946, and took a Master of Fine Arts in 1949. For years he drifted between Cubism, Expressionism and a late conversion to Abstract Expressionism, earning money as a draftsman and window decorator in Cleveland.
Teaching at Rutgers from 1960 brought him into contact with Allan Kaprow and back toward popular imagery. His trademark became Ben-Day dots, the mechanical printing pattern he copied meticulously by hand, alongside flat colour and heavy outlines. Leo Castelli began showing him in 1961, and his first solo show there in 1962 sold out to collectors before it opened. Drowning Girl (1963), taken from a DC romance comic drawn by Tony Abruzzo, now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art.
Whaam! (1963), a diptych about 4 metres wide showing a fighter jet blasting an enemy plane, was bought by the Tate in 1966. Lichtenstein said he wanted emotionally charged subjects such as love and war to clash with his cool, deliberate technique. Not everyone was persuaded: a 1964 Life magazine headline asked whether he was the worst artist in the country. He largely dropped comic panels in 1965, moving on to sculpture, brushstroke parodies and reworkings of Picasso, Monet and Matisse.
The borrowing still draws argument. Artists such as Jack Kirby and Russ Heath, whose panels he adapted, rarely received credit. Jack Cowart of the Lichtenstein Foundation insists no painting is an exact copy, since scale, colour and meaning all changed, while cartoonist Art Spiegelman quipped that he did as much for comics as Warhol did for soup. Honours included the National Medal of Arts in 1995, and Masterpiece (1962) reportedly sold privately in 2017 for $165 million. He died on September 29, 1997.
Source: Roy Lichtenstein
