Roy Lichtenstein

Artist Biography

Lichtenstein grew up under no specific artistic influence, neither at home nor at school. But at the age of 14 he attended a painting class at Parson's School of Design every Saturday morning. From 1940 to 1943 he studied in New York at the Art Students League. Then he was drafted to the US Army and served in Europe during War II. Back from the army, Lichtenstein studied at the Ohio State University from 1946 and received his M.A. in 1949. Like Andy Warhol he worked in the commercial art, prints and posters business for a while, making designs and decorating shop windows. From 1957 on, he taught at different universities.

Lichtenstein's first experiments with popular images go back to 1956, when he created the famous Ten Dollar Bill print, then followed a three year period of painting abstract art, prints and posters. The drastic change in Lichtenstein's career came with his first painting in the style of a comic strip. It was a painting of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The story goes, that he painted it for his kids who had provoked him by saying that "daddy could not paint as well as the images in the comic books”. So it may have been his own kids, who are responsible for the artist's move to art celebrity.

Lichtenstein worked a lot with stencils, thus producing rows of oversized dots that should make his art, paintings, prints and posters look like a huge mass publication product. Although he prepared and executed his works painstakingly like the old masters, he wanted his works of art look like machine made. One of his peculiarities was that he did not want his brush strokes to be seen. Other than paintings and sculptures, the artist produced a number of prints for which he used different techniques: lithographs, screenprints, etchings and woodcuts. Often he combined these techniques in one print.

Roy Lichtenstein Art, Prints and Posters Collection