Why is roy lichtenstein important

He studied engineering as a part of his training at DePaul University in Chicago and then served as infantryman across Europe. He was honorably discharged in and he returned to finish his Fine Arts degree at Ohio State University, where he then also attended a graduate program and became an art instructor. His war service greatly influenced the subject matter of his work and several of his works, notably Whaam! The show featured three-dimensional assemblage works made of wood, metal and found objects.

During this time, his work included Cubist and Expressionist elements. After moving to Cleveland for six years, he then returned to New York and began teaching at the State University at Oswego. He also became fascinated with German Expressionism later in his life, mimicking themes and iconography from the Der Blaue Reiter expressionist group and paintings by Otto Dix. His first work in his signature style is the painting Look Mickey which features the characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

His work lived in the gap between highbrow and lowbrow art, navigating unprecedented territory by utilizing elements of popular culture. This proved highly controversial and yielded scathing reviews from art critics and the general public, calling him a plagiarist rather than an artist.

Lichtenstein defended his artistic style, however, saying that his comic-book inspirations were what made his pieces resonate with the public.

However, this was a deliberate choice by the artist. This included Ben-Day dots and a restricted, four-tone color palette, which was used by comic and poster printers, to get his desired effect. His developed artistic process included drawing the subject by hand on a small scale, then projecting the subject onto a larger canvas.

He then outlined the work and colored it in with his Ben-Day dots, color palette and thick, comic-style outlining. During his time teaching at universities, Lichtenstein had met and befriended other resident artists such as Allan Kaprow and George Segal. After he began to work in his signature style, Kaprow, recognizing the radicalism in his paintings, introduced Lichtenstein to prominent art dealers and galleries in New York.

Sherman Studio Art Center at the university in his later life. In a dark room, he would flash an image on a screen for only a second or two and then ask participants to sketch or describe what they saw in as full of detail as possible. Lichtenstein referenced this technique as a very important part of his development as a Pop artist.

He was one of the most influential Pop artists. Similar to his contemporaries such as Andy Warhol or Jasper Johns , Lichtenstein worked in a style, technique, and subject that illustrated popular culture and everyday American life. As opposed to the more psychological form and color subject of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art looked at mass culture and mass communication for its themes and subject matter.

His style employed Ben-Day dots, bold, primary colors, and graphic outlines — all of which mimicked that of a cartoon style, but at a much larger scale. Many nay-sayers challenged it as unoriginal, copycat, banal art that looked too close to the original source.

Lichtenstein was offered the position of assistant professor, and he began teaching at Douglass in September At Douglass, Lichtenstein was thrown into a maelstrom of artistic ferment.

In June , Lichtenstein returned to the idea he had fooled around with in Oswego, which was to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art.

Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey , which were swiftly followed by The Engagement Ring , Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg.

Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious.

Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School. With the advent of critical and commercial success, Lichtenstein made significant changes in his life and continued to investigate new possibilities in his art.

After separating from his wife, he moved from New Jersey to Manhattan in ; in , he resigned from his teaching position at Douglass to concentrate exclusively on his work. Participating in one such project—the American Supermarket show in at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, for which he designed a shopping bag—Lichtenstein met Dorothy Herzka b.

Guggenheim Museum. Wanting to grow, Lichtenstein turned away from the comic book subjects that had brought him prominence. In the late s his work became less narrative and more abstract, as he continued to meditate on the nature of the art enterprise itself.

He began to explore and deconstruct the notion of brushstrokes—the building blocks of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself. Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further: a compositional element could serve as the subject matter of a work and make that bromide ring true.

The search for new forms and sources was even more emphatic after , when Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein bought property in Southampton, New York, and made it their primary residence. In the Mirror series, he dealt with light and shadow upon glass, and in the Entablature series, he considered the same phenomena by abstracting such Beaux-Art architectural elements as cornices, dentils, capitals and columns.

The bronze forms were as flat and thin as possible, more related to line than volume, and they portrayed the most fugitive sensations—curls of steam, rays of light and reflections on glass.