BIOGRAPHY
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923. He attended school there, and in 1939 studied with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League. The following year he entered Ohio State University. However, in 1943 his education was interrupted; he served in the U.S. Army for three years. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio State University in 1946 and a master of fine arts in 1949. He taught at Ohio State until 1951, then went to Cleveland to work. In 1957 he started teaching at Oswego State College in New York; in 1960 he moved to Rutgers University. Three years later he gave up teaching to paint full time.
Working with stencils, Lichtenstein developed a technique using rows of dots that mimicked the commercial printing patterns used in the production of comic books. This resemblance was further emphasized by Lichtenstein's selection of a palette of bright primary colors that replicated the chromatic range of comic books. Lichtenstein's unconventional paintings, regarded by many as beyond the bounds of fine art during the 1960s, are now considered icons of the Pop Art movement and have secured the artist's place in art history.
1996 marked a major departure for Lichtenstein. In an exhibition at New York's Leo Castelli gallery, he unveiled a series of paintings, "Landscapes in the Chinese Style," which eschewed irony in favor of delicate, wispy "impressions" of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The series was praised for its subtlety and restraint, as recognizable Lichtenstein techniques - the use of modulated dots to represent mass for example - were used to support the compositions rather than to declare an individual style. Lichtenstein died on Sept. 29, 1997, at the age of 73.
