Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (27 October 1923 - 29 September 1997) was a prominent American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible".

Early years

Roy Lichtenstein was born on 27 October 1923 into an upper-middle-class family in New York City, and attended public school until he was 12. He then enrolled at the Franklin School for Boys, in Manhattan, for his secondary education. The school did not have an art department, and he became interested in art and design as hobby outside of his schooling. He was an avid fan of jazz and often attended concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He would often draw portraits of the musicians at their instruments . During 1939, in his final year at the academy, he enrolled in summer art classes at the Art Students League of New York under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh On graduating in 1940, Lichtenstein left New York to study at the Ohio State University which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts.[1] His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II between 1943 and 1946. He returned to his studies in Ohio after the war and one of his teachers at the time, Hoyt L. Sherman, is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work (Lichtenstein would later name a new studio he funded at OSU as the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1951 he had his first one-man exhibition at a gallery in New York. He moved to Cleveland in 1951, where he remained for six years, although frequently traveling to New York, doing jobs as various as draftsman to window decorator in between periods of painting. His work at this time was based on cubist interpretations of other artist's paintings such as Frederic Remington. In 1957 he moved back to upstate New York and began teaching again. It is at this time that he adopted the Abstract Expressionism style, a late convert to this style of painting; he showed his work in 1959 to an unenthusiastic audience.