Roy Lichtenstein
Roy LichtensteinRoy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City on October 27th, 1923. He described his childhood as quiet and uneventful. His father was a realtor; his mother was a housewife. Art was not taught at the school Roy attended, but when he turned fourteen he began taking Saturday morning classes at the Parson� School of Design. After he graduated from high school in 1940 he attended the School of Fine Art at Ohio State University. He was drafted however in 1943 in the middle of his education at Ohio State. While he was in the military he served in Great Britain and Europe. When he returned to the U.S. in 1946, he completed his studies for his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Ohio State University in 1949. After he got his degree he immediately began teaching at Ohio State and kept teaching there until 1951. He then taught at New York State University College, Oswego from 1957 until 1961 when he transferred and began teaching at Douglas College of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ he stopped teaching there in 1963. Later that year Roy moved to New York where he was commissioned by the architect Philip Johnson to produce large format painting for the New York State Pavilion at the World�s Fair in New York. This year he also had his first one-man exhibition in Europe at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris. He was given his first American retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Cleveland in 1963 also. Other exhibitions where Roy was represented in the sixties was the Venice Biennale in 1966, 1968, and 1970. In 1967-1968 he had a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, this was also shown throughout the world including Minneapolis. In 1969 he was given a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
His career as an artist mainly started in 1951, he usually painted cowboys and Indians in various modern art styles. In 1957 he tried his hand at Abstract Expressionism. What he is famous for though is his works based on comic strips. This all began with a painting he made of Mickey Mouse in 1960 for his children. By 1961 Lichtenstein was completely dedicated to the making of art from mass-produced, merchandising images. His comic-strip paintings, such as Good Morning, Darling, are blowups of the original cartoon characters, reproduced by hand, with the same technique of benday dots and bright primary colors used in printing. This result was a blend of commercial art and abstraction. He tried to use brilliant colors outlined in black to emphasis the visual impact. These painting made him famous and the first one-man...
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