Whitney retrospective explores Roy Lichtenstein’s six decades of image-making
Roy Lichtenstein’s work is the subject of *Like New*, a major retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum, the first in the city for 33 years. The exhibition presents him as more than an ironic borrower of comic-book and consumer images, highlighting his sustained investigation of how people see and remember images.
The show includes more than 130 works from across six decades, including rarely seen pieces and unfinished canvases. Its 96-foot recreation of the 1983 Greene Street Mural draws on Lichtenstein’s interest in the Bayeux tapestry’s serial storytelling. Curators also researched the influence of his mentor Hoyt Sherman, whose “flash labs” trained students to draw images they had seen only briefly in darkness.
- Whitney retrospective reconsiders Lichtenstein’s art.
- More than 130 works span six decades.
- Hoyt Sherman’s visual experiments shaped his approach.
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Roy Lichtenstein was an American artist whose paintings, made from the 1950s onwards, took images directly from comic books and advertisements and enlarged them enormously. His work was notable because it treated commercial imagery that most people considered trivial as subjects worthy of fine art.
For many years, people understood Lichtenstein primarily as an artist who simply enlarged and reproduced images from comics and consumer products. Over time, however, art historians and curators have come to see his work as involving a deeper investigation into how images function and how people view them.
The Whitney Museum in New York is hosting a major retrospective of Lichtenstein's paintings, the first in the city for 33 years. The exhibition draws on new research into what influenced his practice, offering a fuller picture of what his artistic investigations were about.
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Originally published by The Guardian as “‘What could be discovered? What is new there?’: blockbuster exhibition celebrates Roy Lichtenstein”.