Lichtenstein, Roy -

October 27, 1923– September 29, 1997

Roy Lichtenstein was a master pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being “as artificial as possible.”

His paintings reflect modern typographic and printing techniques such as Ben-Day dots and make innovative use of commonplace imagery. His most famous image is arguably Whaam!, one of the earliest known examples of pop art, featuring a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a dazzling red and yellow explosion.

His work of the 1970s largely consisted of ironic reinterpretatons of well-known paintings by famous painters. His paintings of the 1980s and 90s (“brush stroke paintings”), which often include both real and simulated brush strokes, are typified by the large canvas Figures in a Landscape (1986).

His painting Torpedo…Los! sold at Christie’s for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time, one of only three artists to have attracted such huge sums for art produced within the artists lifetime.

Roy Lichtenstein died of pneumonia in 1997 at New York University Medical Center.

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