The Whitney Museum of American Art has launched a comprehensive survey of the career and influence of Roy Lichtenstein, marking the first major New York retrospective for the Mid-Century Pop Art pioneer in decades. Titled “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” the exhibition tracks the artist’s evolution from his early experiments in Abstract Expressionism to the iconic, comic-inspired style that redefined American contemporary art.
The exhibition features many of the paintings that cemented Lichtenstein’s fame alongside rarely seen drawings, sculptures, notes, and his only commissioned film. The show spans his entire career, from the formative years of the early 1960s to his late-period monumental sculptures of the 1990s.
One of the exhibition’s focal points is the 1961 painting “Look Mickey,” which art historians frequently cite as the pivotal moment Lichtenstein abandoned Neo-Expressionist efforts to explore the aesthetic of commercial printing. While the work appears to mimic simple newsprint from a distance, close inspection reveals that the thousands of Ben-Day dots—later synonymous with his style—were painstakingly hand-painted and drawn in pencil. This precision aligns Lichtenstein’s method more closely with the Pointillism of Georges Seurat than the spontaneous action painting of his contemporaries like Jackson Pollock.
The scale of the presentation is established immediately at the entrance with the “Green Street Mural.” Originally created in 1983 and destroyed in 1984, the piece has been replicated to its original scale for the Whitney exhibition, standing 20 feet high and stretching 100 feet long. The mural serves as an introduction to the artist’s recurring themes: the blurring of lines between “high” and “low” art, the use of thick black outlines, and a palette of vibrant primary colors.
Among the seminal works included is “Drowning Girl” (1963), a five-and-a-half-foot square canvas inspired by a 1962 comic book panel. Lichtenstein’s version purposefully alters the source material, introducing references to 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints and 20th-century Surrealism. The exhibition places several such works alongside their preliminary sketches, as seen with “Ohhh…Alright…” (1964), allowing visitors to see how Lichtenstein intensified color and composition from initial colored pencil drafts to final oil and Magna paintings.
The Whitney’s exhibition design also pays homage to art history through a gallery space that recreates Lichtenstein’s ground-breaking 1962 debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery. This intimate room features works such as “Blam” (1962), “Laughing Cat” (1961), and “The Kiss” (1961), some of which are on loan from private collections and rarely available for public viewing. This section aims to transport visitors back to the era of the Space Race and the early 1960s, a period when Lichtenstein’s work was viewed as a radical commentary on consumerism and the war industry.
Later galleries move beyond the primary-color comic panels to showcase Lichtenstein’s dialogue with other masters. “Still Life with Goldfish” (1972) reinterprets Henri Matisse’s 1912 Fauvist painting, while a five-panel series from 1969 provides a Pop Art take on Claude Monet’s views of Rouen Cathedral. The Monet-inspired panels utilize iridescent shades of yellow, orange, and purple to create a visual effect described as a controlled form of psychedelia.
The retrospective extends to the museum’s fifth-floor terrace, which houses two monumental outdoor works. The 30-foot-high “Coups de Pinceau” (1988), also known as the “Sculpture for Paris,” sits alongside a large-scale metal portrait of a redheaded woman. These pieces represent a period in the 1980s and 1990s when Lichtenstein was commissioned for major international projects in cities such as Barcelona and Tokyo.
“Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” will remain on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 10, 2027, offering a rare opportunity to see the physical handiwork behind an artist whose style is now frequently replicated by digital filters and artificial intelligence.
