Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 in New York City. As a child, Roy and his sister were consistently exposed to the arts by their mother, Beatrice, via museums, concerts, and other facets of the New York art scene. Roy was a gifted draughtsman, painter, and sculptor. He was also very musically-inclined and played the piano and clarinet. In September 1940, he enrolled in the College of Education at The Ohio State University. After being drafted in 1943, Lichtenstein returned in 1946 in order to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at OSU. His work was popular in New York City where he continued to deal his art and eventually hold his first show in the Carlebach Gallery in 1951. He accepted a job at the State University of New York in Oswego as an assistant professor in 1957. Here, he applied famous cartoon characters to expressionistic backgrounds, a truly new idea at the time. Then, in 1960, Lichtenstein began his job as an assistant professor at Douglass College, a part of Rutgers University. At Douglass, he began to experiment with his now-famous comic book style and developed a technique that imitated the effect of the Ben-Day dots. In the 1960s, he signed with the Leo Castelli Gallery, which made him famous in the art world after the first show. After this, he began to explore other ideas and would eventually leave his iconic subjects in favor of a more experimental work. Lichtenstein died in 1997.
-Jim Wilson
