The Whitney Museum of American Art is set to open a major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein’s work on October 11, marking the artist’s first New York survey in over three decades. The exhibition, titled “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” will showcase a broad array of works spanning the artist’s career from the early 1940s through the mid-1990s, including paintings, drawings, prints, collages, photographs, sculptures, and a three-channel film.
Lichtenstein, a central figure of the Pop Art movement, is widely recognized for his hand-painted reproductions of comic book imagery and advertising that transformed mass-media motifs into celebrated works of high art. However, this retrospective aims to challenge the conventional view of Lichtenstein solely as a Pop artist. Curator and artist Alex Da Corte, in collaboration with Whitney curator Meg Onli, seeks to highlight the conceptual and experimental dimensions of his work, emphasizing his engagement with broader art movements such as Fluxus and his connections to avant-garde artists and practices.
Da Corte noted that while he was initially familiar with Lichtenstein’s ubiquitous imagery, deeper research revealed the artist’s conceptual approach and his involvement in the emergent “happenings” of the 1960s. Lichtenstein taught alongside Allan Kaprow, a pioneer of performance art, and participated in one of Kaprow’s events in 1963. The exhibition reflects this dimension by including works and documentation that illustrate Lichtenstein’s dialogue with the Fluxus movement, known for its embrace of do-it-yourself aesthetics and ephemeral materials.
The retrospective also addresses the complex dynamics of artistic appropriation. Lichtenstein’s work itself was appropriated and reinterpreted by contemporaries, including artist Elaine Sturtevant, who copied his work with his assistance. This reciprocal process extended to Lichtenstein’s practice as well, complicating straightforward notions of originality. The show places Lichtenstein’s paintings side by side with those of postmodern appropriation artists from the 1970s and 1980s—often called the Pictures Generation—to provide historical context for ongoing debates about authorship and replication.
A highlight of the exhibition is a meticulous reconstruction of Lichtenstein’s 1962 debut at the Castelli Gallery, recreated with original lighting and flooring to evoke the original installation. This marks the first time the entire exhibition has been reassembled, featuring works loaned from private collections, including “Laughing Cat,” once owned by Andy Warhol.
Another key element of the show is an introduction to the Flash Lab, an experimental studio established by Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University where Lichtenstein studied in the 1940s. The Flash Lab employed bursts of light to illuminate still-life arrangements for a brief instant, after which students rendered the scenes from memory. Sherman’s method influenced Lichtenstein’s explorations of visual perception and informed the aesthetic of several of his war-themed paintings, such as “Warroom” (1963) and “As I Opened Fire” (1964).
Da Corte contributes to the exhibition not only as curator but also as an artist, performing the role of Hoyt Sherman in an original video commissioned for the show. This performative approach is intended to offer visitors an immersive entry point into Lichtenstein’s creative mindset. Additionally, Da Corte and his team have recreated large-scale murals originally produced by Lichtenstein, including a fifteen-foot installation of “Girl in Window” (1963), first exhibited at the New York World’s Fair.
The retrospective follows significant gifts from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which in 2018 donated approximately 400 works to the Whitney. The artist’s widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, further contributed by donating their former Greenwich Village home and studio, now the site of the Whitney Independent Study Program. The exhibition draws extensively from these holdings and aims to present a fresh, nuanced understanding of Lichtenstein’s legacy for contemporary audiences.