Roy Lichtenstein Prints for Sale
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was an American pop artist along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Tom Wesselman, amogst others. He was born in New York City and studied art at Ohio State University where he was encouraged by Hoyt L. Sherman. After serving for the infantry in Europe during the war, he returned to Ohio State University and became a lecturer as well as completing his Masters there.
In the 1960s, Lichtenstein highlighted the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized. He became professor at Douglass College in New Jersey and after a sell-out exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York was famous for his comic book style paintings which parodied popular advertising. His precise painting of cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing including his trademark dots. He also reproduced masterpieces by Cezanne, Mondrian and Picasso in comic book style.
He made over 300 prints, mostly in screenprinting as well as producing paintings and sculptures. Whamm! and Drowning Girl are considered to be his most famous works and his work, Masterpiece, sold for a whopping $165 million in 2017.
Lichtenstein's works sparked widespread debate about their merits as art. Lichtenstein himself admitted, "I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture. It isn't thick or thin brushstrokes, it's dots and flat colours and unyielding lines."
In the 1970s he built a studio in Southampton, Long Island and lived in relative seclusion where his style loosened up and he expanded borrowing stylistic elements from German Expressionism, He produced a major series of surrealist-pop paintings and continued to make work covering a variety of motifs and themes including his Still Life paintings, sculptures and drawings from traditional subjects, such as fruit and flowers.
After the artist's death from pneumonia in 1997, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was established in 1999.
