Chronology

1923

October 27, 1923

Roy Fox Lichtenstein is born in Manhattan to Milton (1893–1946) and Beatrice (Werner Bernardi; 1896–1991). Milton, a real-estate broker for Lichtenstein & Loeb and co-owner of Garage Realty, is a first-generation German Jewish American. Beatrice, a homemaker and gifted piano player, is of German Jewish descent. The family resides on the Upper West Side in New York at 240 West 98th Street.

1924

Family moves to 310 West 99th Street.

1927

Family resides at 924 West End Avenue at 105th Street.

December 17, 1927

Sister Renée is born.

1928

Fall 1928

Attends kindergarten near 104th Street and West End Avenue.

1931

Over concerns about the Depression, family moves to a smaller apartment at 505 West End Avenue at 84th Street.

Fall 1931

Begins first grade at P.S. 9. Develops a strong interest in drawing and science and later recalls spending time designing model airplanes. Frequently visits the American Museum of Natural History. Favorite radio shows include The Shadow, Jack Armstrong, Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician.

1934

Family moves to a much larger seven-room apartment at 305 West 86th Street with his maternal grandfather. Father’s business is unaffected by the Depression.

1935

October 10, 1935

George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess debuts at the Alvin Theater. Later makes pen-and-ink sketches of the show.

1936

Fall 1936

Starts eighth grade at Franklin School for Boys, a private school in Manhattan. Interest in art is piqued, offering a respite from school instruction. During high school, studies French and Latin.

1937

Enrolls in Saturday morning watercolor classes at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons School of Design). Paints still lifes and flower arrangements using watercolor and opaque watercolor; also works directly from the model.

During high school, studies the clarinet and plays the piano. Visits jazz clubs with friend Don Wolf. Forms a small band.

Summer 1937

Makes "romantic watercolors" of the forest trees and lake while at camp in Maine.¹Oral history interview with Roy Lichtenstein, November 15, 1963–January 15, 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Conducted by Richard Baker Brown.]

Receives first art book, Thomas Craven’s Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning.

1938

January 16, 1938

Attends Benny Goodman’s first concert at Carnegie Hall. Begins doing renditions of jazz music.

1939

April 30, 1939

Opening of the 1939–40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, whose theme is "Building the World of Tomorrow." Is a frequent visitor.

1940

June 1940

Graduates from Franklin.

July 1–August 9, 1940

Attends Reginald Marsh’s painting class at the Art Students League. Learns to paint directly from the model. Studies anatomical drawing and Renaissance techniques such as glazing and underpainting, which he applies to quotidian subjects. Later recalls Marsh adding musculature and the like to his paintings. Feeling that Marsh’s paintings have a "brassy … very commercial" quality, is ultimately dissatisfied with the course’s insistence on technique over process.²Oral history interview with Roy Lichtenstein, November 15, 1963–January 15, 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Conducted by Richard Baker Brown.] In most paintings from the time, strives for exact representation of model.

September 23, 1940

Begins undergraduate degree at the Ohio State University (OSU) in the College of Education. First art classes are Art Appreciation, taught by Frank Roos, and Advanced Freehand Drawing. Other classes include Education Survey, Field Artillery and Botany. Pledges Phi Sigma Delta and moves into the fraternity house at 1968 Iuka Avenue in Columbus.

November 7–December 8, 1940

Sees Picasso’s masterwork Guernica, 1937, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is a venue for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Paintings of the period include abstract works based on landscapes, still lifes and figure studies.

1941

Winter 1941

Classes at OSU include Elementary Design and Elementary Freehand Drawing, along with Field Artillery and Comprehension and Reading.

Spring 1941

Takes Drawing from the Head, taught by Robert Gatrell, and Introduction to Literature, as well as continued classes in field artillery.

Fall 1941

Enrolls in History through the Ages, taught by Robert Fanning, a yearlong survey course of Western, Asian and Indian art history. Textbook is Art through the Ages by Helen Gardner, in which he makes several sketches. Takes first drawing class taught by Hoyt Sherman, Drawing from Life. Learns about the concept of kinesthetic drawing, which is based on psychological optics. In 1945, Sherman realizes his "flash lab," a totally darkened room in which a tachistoscope projects slides of objects in quick succession. Students draw what they see based on the automatic recall of afterimages formed on their retinas. Does not experience Sherman’s flash lab, but his idea of art—reflected in statements such as, "Organized perception is what art is all about"³Lichtenstein made this comment in the interview Swenson 1963. —is deeply influenced by Sherman.

Moves to North High Street off campus in Columbus.

Picasso’s Blue Period is a significant influence despite pervasiveness of Regionalism at OSU.

1942

Winter 1942

Attends Intermediate Design with Roos, and Sculpture with Erwin Frey, where he works with Plasticine. Later recalls making a blue ceramic water buffalo sculpture. Later subjects include mechanical drawing, economics, humanities and the natural sciences.

Moves to student housing; creates drawing of roommate’s feet soaking in a basin. Among works admired at the time are Picasso’s Guernica and Honoré Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage, c. 1862–64.

Spring 1942

Takes first class in oil painting, with James Grimes. Also takes Evolution of Design with Wayne Anderla.

Summer 1942

Enrolls in Portrait Painting with Grimes, Principles of Drawing and Principles of Economics.

Fall 1942

Completes classes in drawing, as well as Principles of Advertising and Technical Problems.

Paintings are done primarily on paper or inexpensive chipboard. Uses big cans of soybean-based paint similar to water-based house paint. Begins to stretch own canvases.

1943

February 6, 1943

Drafted and inducted into the US Army. Enters active service three days later.

March 1943

Begins basic training at Camp Hulen, Texas, an anti-aircraft training base.

June 1943–March 1944

Applies to A.S.T.P. (Army Special Training Program). Fails medicine exam, but passes in languages. Army cuts languages program and instead sends him for engineering training at DePaul University, Chicago. Takes classes in math, chemistry, physics, geography, speech and history; twenty-four weeks in, Army cancels program.

Travels to Loop in downtown Chicago to hear jazz.

1944

January 1944

Passes his physical exam for the Air Corps.

February 1944

Transferred to Fort Sheridan in Illinois. Studies French.

March 1944

Arrives at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, for pilot-training program. Hitchhikes with pals to New Orleans. Due to the enormous number of casualties in the Battle of the Bulge and the consequent need for soldiers to replace them, the pilot-training program is terminated a month later.

April 1944

Arrives at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and reports to 69th Infantry Division, Ninth Army headquarters. Serves as orderly to a two-star major general. Duties include enlarging William H. Mauldin cartoons in Stars and Stripes for commanding officer.

June 1944

Works as draftsman and artist in G-3 (Plans and Training).

August 1944

Draws maps in the Intelligence Section of the Engineers Battalion, 69th Infantry Division, Ninth Army.

Works from this period include black watercolor or charcoal drawings of the rugged terrain of Mississippi swamps.

December 1944

Division is shipped to Europe. Boat has a library; there reads Edgar Allan Poe and philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and John Locke.

December 21, 1944

In London, sees Paul Cézanne and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec works in an exhibition. Buys a book on Chinese painting and sends it home in a duffle along with a collection of African masks.

Continues to draw in conté crayon, black ink and ink wash on paper. Subjects include trees in London parks.

1945

January 1945

Begins combat operations in France, working in an office a mile from the front. Does quite a bit of drawing in between Army tasks, such as maintaining roads and bridges. On a furlough to Paris, buys three portfolios of reproductions of Rembrandt etchings.

February 1945

Arrives in Belgium.

April 1945

Writes home reporting only fair results with drawings and paintings in black-and-white tempera.

May 1945

69th Infantry Division is the first to meet up with the Soviet Army. Awarded a battle star ribbon although not directly involved in the fighting. Transferred to the Ninth Army. Continues combat operations in Germany.

Receives oil paints from home.

June 1945

Sent to Oberammergau, a picturesque German town in the Bavarian Alps. Works at the Army’s Information and Education School. Prepares and delivers half-hour lectures on the War in Europe and the Pacific as well as the Japanese Army based on information he reads in Fortune magazine.

July 1945

Paints in gouache.

September 1945

Travels by rail to Paris on a three-day pass and visits the Louvre Museum. Remarks on El Greco’s Christ on the Cross Adored by Two Donors, c. 1590, Cézanne’s The Card Players, 1890–92, and Daumier’s La Blanchisseuse, 1863. At the Louvre bookshop, buys a small book on Fauvist Georges Rouault. In a letter home, writes of doing stacks of drawings and of intention to study painting, citing Picasso, Rouault and Matisse. Buys books on Francisco Goya’s etchings and Georges Seurat’s paintings, even though he later remarks that he was not that inspired by latter’s work.

October 15, 1945

Selected to attend a French Language and Civilization course at the Sorbonne in Paris through the Army’s civilian agency AEP program. Begins classes in late October where he resides at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris on Boulevard Jourdan located in the southern outskirts of the city. Passes Picasso’s studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins but decides not to intrude. Completes four hundred hours.

December 2, 1945

Leaves Europe for the United States.

December 5, 1945

Reports home to Fort Dix, New Jersey, after learning that his father is very ill.

1946

January 11, 1946

Discharged from the Army with the rank of PFC (Private First Class) as a Draftsman 070 and returns home. Regularly visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art with mother and sister.

February 13, 1946

Milton Lichtenstein dies.

March 1946

Returns to OSU to complete degree. Courses include History of Renaissance Art and Watercolor Painting.

June 1946

Receives BFA degree from OSU, College of Education, School of Fine and Applied Arts. Lives and works in a small room in a converted mess hall off campus.

September 1946

Joins OSU School of Fine and Applied Arts faculty as an instructor.

October 1946

Teaches drawing and design courses. Creates own version of a flash lab, stacking boxes in a darkened room and asking students to draw the afterimage using charcoal or crayon on paper.

Lives at 804 Neil Avenue in downtown Columbus.

Creates stone-like sculptures from Hydrocal, a castable plaster product. Figures have Picassoesque features but seem almost pre-Columbian in style. Tries painting geometric abstractions in the style of Piet Mondrian, but with a different palette. Fewer than ten canvases were made and they were later destroyed.

1947

January 1947

Enrolls in the Graduate School of Fine and Applied Arts at OSU. Travels with Charles Csuri to see various art exhibitions in New York.

Spring 1947

Classes include Technical Problems and Water Color Painting with Bradley.

Occasionally returns to New York with friends Stanley Twardowicz and Csuri to visit galleries, especially Charles Egan and Betty Parsons Galleries.

Paintings of this period depict bulbous figures with animated features. Continues to work in ceramic; details emulate Joan Miró. Found object pieces have a Paul Klee-like quality.

Gets a centrifuge casting machine to create silver jewelry using lost wax process. Buys a small electrical kiln for enameling.

Fall 1947

Enrolls in Advanced Research Problems and Research in Art History: Criticism and Philosophy of Art.

1948

May 29–June 18, 1948

First group exhibition in New York, at Chinese Gallery, which shows American art along with classical Chinese art forms, including ceramics.

Fall 1948

Classes include Art History Research and Criticism.

Produces pastels, oils and drawings. Subjects include musicians, landscapes and fairy tales.

Begins showing work at the new location of the Ten-Thirty Gallery, located on the third floor of the State Theater Building in Cleveland. Algesa O’Sickey is one of the directors and is the wife of faculty colleague Joseph O’Sickey. Modernist architect Robert Little provides the sketches for the L-shaped floor space.

1949

March 1949

Receives MFA from OSU. Completes MFA thesis, "Paintings, Drawings, and Pastels," which includes a series of poems celebrating various artists, including Matisse, Klee, Picasso, Rousseau, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautrec, Rembrandt and the Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan.

June 12, 1949

Marries Isabel Sarisky (née Wilson b. July 26, 1921 in Van Wert, Ohio; d. Sept. 25, 1980), assistant director at Ten-Thirty Gallery (1515 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH), whom he meets through the O’Sickeys earlier that year. She is recently divorced from prominent Cleveland artist Michael Sarisky (b. 1906; d. January 12, 1974). Richard Gosminski takes over Isabel’s role as assistant director when she moves to Columbus and she begins to paint. Algesa O’Sickey steps down as director in December.

Summer 1949

Begins class work toward PhD, taking courses in Minor Problems in Painting, Technical Problems: Painting and Minor Problems: Arts Education.

Fall 1949

Takes painting classes with Sherman and Grimes.

December 7–30, 1949

Ten-Thirty Gallery exhibits twenty oils and pastels along with work by ceramists Harry Schulke and Charles Lakosky. Works are described by Cleveland Press as "flat abstracts with objects like animals, plants and faces being faintly recognizable."⁴Frankel 1949

Borrows book on nineteenth-century American painter George Catlin from colleague Roy Harvey Pearce. North American Indian themes begin to appear in paintings and drawings in 1950.

1950

Rents a two-story house at 1496 Perry Street in Columbus with Isabel, which doubles as a studio. Begins to use paint cans full of sand to counterbalance an old easel in order to rotate canvases. Uses a mirror to see paintings upside down to abstract the subject matter and concentrate on compositional unity.

Summer 1950

Takes Mural Painting, Research: Oil and Watercolor Painting and final Technical Problems class.

July 28, 1950

Denied tenure at OSU due to lack of "substantial growth."

Flowers and birds, along with medieval imagery, account for much of subject matter. Influenced by a friend’s book on the Bayeux Tapestry.

August 1950

Woodcut To Battle takes first prize at the Ohio State Fair.

Isabel finds work at Arts and Crafts, the interior design department of Tibbals-Crumley-Musson Architects; coordinates exhibitions of artisan jewelry and ceramics.

Regularly attends jazz Philharmonic performances in Columbus. Teaches himself to play the flute.

1951

Starts to bring paintings to galleries in New York, such as M. Knoedler and Sidney Janis, transporting them on top of car. During his teaching years, goes to Cedar Tavern on University Place and sometimes talks to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Barnett Newman, but is too shy to really get to know them.

March 21–May 20, 1951

To Battle is exhibited in a Brooklyn Museum juried show, Fifth National Print Annual Exhibition, and receives a museum purchase award.

April 30–May 12, 1951

First solo exhibition in New York, at Carlebach Gallery, which includes: oils and pastels; prints rendered in muted pinks, blues and mauves; and assemblages made from wood, metal pieces and found objects such as screws and drill buffers.

June 1951

Moves to Cleveland and sets up home and studio on the second floor of the Music Center Building at 1150 Prospect Avenue, across from Gray’s Armory. Isabel finds work as an assistant interior decorator at Jane L. Hanson, Inc.

Paints an Early Renaissance-style self-portrait.

Fills notebook with cartoonlike drawings of things such as bananas.

August 1951

King on Horseback takes first prize in sculpture at the Ohio State Fair.

Draws clowns and other fairground scenes in sketchbooks.

December 2, 1951

Exhibits "colorful silkscreen prints" for The "Craftsman" Christmas exhibition of Art Colony Galleries in Cleveland.⁵Cleveland Plain Dealer 1951

December 31, 1951–January 12, 1952

Solo exhibition at John Heller Gallery in New York, consisting of sixteen paintings based on American frontier themes and several self-portraits as a knight. Sherman contributes a brief preface to the show’s brochure. One painting in the show, The Death of the General, is reproduced in Artnews and Art Digest.

Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York (32 E. 57th St.) begins carrying his jewelry.

Begins to incorporate titles and advertising copy in woodcut compositions and paintings such as Emigrant Train After William Ranney.

1952

Contributes work to juried exhibitions, including Denver City Building, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the University of Nebraska. A charcoal of that year, Two Indians (Study), is included in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 2–22, 1952

Solo exhibition at the Art Colony Galleries. Show elicits mixed responses. One pencil drawing, which includes a photo of a castle taped onto it, is described by a Cleveland News art critic as “truly like the doodling of a five-year-old.” Is referred to as an “odd talent.”⁶Bruner 1952

Decorates display windows and floors part-time at a Halle Brothers’ Euclid Huron department store.

1953

January 26–February 7, 1953

Second solo exhibition at John Heller Gallery, consisting of oils and watercolors based on Americana themes. The Statesman is reproduced in Artnews in black and white.

September 20–October 5, 1953

Contributes work to the third season opening exhibition of the Art Colony Galleries.

November 1953

Receives an award for woodcut A Cherokee Brave in the Contemporary Printmaking Exhibition at OSU.

Works from his apartment at 11483 Hessler Road in Cleveland. Audits classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

1954

Moves to an apartment at 1863 Crawford Street in Cleveland. Teaches drawing at the Cooper School, a commercial art school in Cleveland. Around this time, designs logo featuring a knife, spoon and fork for Hy-Decker Industrial Caterers, Inc., a commercial catering company run by his friends Margaret and George (Hy) Silverman.

March 8–27, 1954

Third solo exhibition at John Heller Gallery, consisting of paintings on American folklore themes and others that feature depictions of clock and gear parts, based on engineering blueprints that echo French’s Engineering Drawing, illustrated by Sherman. Some works include toys. Critics Robert Rosenblum and Porter review the show for Art Digest and Artnews, respectively.

October 7–24, 1954

Included in Cleveland Museum of Art’s show of "spontaneous and unrehearsed drawings" by local artists,⁷Frankel 1954 although his works are consistently rejected for the museum’s coveted invitational May Show.

October 9, 1954

Son David Hoyt Lichtenstein is born.

Mid-1950s

Creates mosaic tabletops for clients of Isabel, with welding done by a friend.

1955

January 1, 1955

Weatherford Surrenders to Jackson is purchased by collectors and donated to the Butler Museum of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

January 9, 1955

Art Colony Galleries exhibits thirteen paintings in a three-person show that also includes Christine Miller and Louis Penfield. Cleveland Plain Dealer describes paintings in the show as "Klee-like and surprising."⁸Metzler 1955

October–November 1955

Displays jewelry at the Brooklyn Museum Gallery Shop.

Creates several wall-mounted assemblages of painted wood.

Works on the "before" models of a low-income Cleveland neighborhood for a proposed renovation project designed by Little and photographed by Margaret Bourke-White for Life magazine. One contribution is to paint graffiti in the miniature alley.

1956

Creates first proto-Pop work, a lithograph called Ten Dollar Bill (Ten Dollars).

Returns to imagery of the Wild West.

March 10, 1956

Son Mitchell Wilson Lichtenstein is born.

Mechanism, Cross Section is purchased by the same collectors who bought Weatherford Surrenders to Jackson and is donated to the Flint Institute of Arts.

1951–57

Works at various jobs in Cleveland, most lasting about six months each. Hand-paints black-and-white dial markings on volt and amp meters for Hickok Electrical Instrument Co. Travels frequently to New York. Introduced by Stanley Landesman to Herman Cherry and Warren Brandt.

1957

Buys first home at 2421 Edgehill Road in Cleveland Heights and sets up a studio there.

Works as an engineering draftsman making furniture in the Product and Process Department at Republic Steel Company.

January 8–26, 1957

Solo exhibition at John Heller Gallery, consisting of paintings on Americana themes. Works described by critics as "acrid in color" and "flatly patterned … spontaneously felt depictions of a grown-up's child-world."⁹Sawin 1957; A. N., "Pictures on Exhibit," January 1957

February 1957

Invited to exhibit with Group 5, an association of Cleveland artists who banded together in defiance of their omissions from the May show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Lichtenstein shows several paintings and constructions.

May 1957

Shows lithographs at Karamu House, Cleveland, a space featuring artists working in dance, printmaking, theater and writing.

Summer 1957

Offered assistant professorship of art at State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego to teach industrial design. Hoping to get closer to New York, accepts the position.

Moves home and studio to 11 West 6th Street in Oswego, where his family shares a two-family house.

Uses an opaque projector to trace a large image of Mickey Mouse on son Mitchell’s bedroom wall.

Abstract Expressionist style appears in paintings. Later recalls that these canvases were used as drop cloths for first Pop-inspired works.

Style changes to a lyrical abstraction with hatched brushwork featuring images found in books of eighteenth-century French salon paintings of François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Antoine Watteau and rococo oils of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, among others.

1958

March 1958

Six oil paintings are among those Heller sends for an exhibition in Los Angeles.¹⁰Oswegonian 1958c

June 1958

Approaches Csuri’s dealer in New York, Harry Salpeter, whose gallery is across from Heller’s on 57th Street, about representation. Salpeter turns him down.

August 1958

Teaches Industrial Art Design summer course at SUNY Oswego and graduate course in painting. Hosts salon-style open-house evenings for students.

Drawings include renderings of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny using brush and india ink.

Leaves John Heller. Participates in a group show at Condon Riley Gallery in New York. Housed in a Beaux-Arts-style townhouse a floor below the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the gallery space featured walls that simulated dark velvet with a floating ceiling that hid the lighting.

1959

Moves with family to 52 Church Street in Oswego. Maintains a studio in one of the bedrooms. Continues to teach Industrial Arts during the summer and graduate courses in painting.

March 1959

Exhibits oil paintings in Sixth Annual Central Art Exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts.

Spring 1959

Contributes the cover design for Polemic, one of two prints done for the magazine published under a grant from the Adelbert College Student Council at Western Reserve University, Cleveland. His highly abstract image in black with the title of the magazine in red lettering is hand printed on a commercial letterpress printer.

June 2–27, 1959

Untitled lyrical abstractions are shown for the first time in a solo exhibition at Condon Riley Gallery in New York. Paintings feature scant traces of bright color on an unprimed background; some contain heavy impasto and traces of instant coffee. Described as washy, waterish, abstract, thinly painted.

Embarks on a series of abstract works that look like chunky multicolored ribbons using a tea towel wrapped around his arm, which he dips in three of four oil colors laid next to each other on a glass palette, and drags in one direction and then another until all the paint is used, repeating the process with different variations of color. Employs a charcoal nib dipped in paint to create calligraphic lines on some of the canvases and a rag to soften edges.

1960

Spring 1960

Resigns from SUNY Oswego after accepting assistant professorship of art at Douglass College, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. Teaches Art Structure and Design and Advanced Design beginning July 1. Shares an office with Geoffrey Hendricks.

Robert Miller, a future dealer, serves as his teaching assistant.

Moves into a house at 66 S. Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, New Jersey, where he sets up his studio in the bedroom. Bolts a two-by-four to the ceiling, to which he attaches clip-on lights. Paintings are hung throughout the house.

June 6–24, 1960

Sees works by Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in New Form—New Media I, organized by Steve Joy.

Fall 1960

Introduced by colleague Allan Kaprow to Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal (then completing his MFA) and Robert Whitman. Through Robert Watts, another professor in the department, meets George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles and George Maciunas, all artists who will be involved with Fluxus.

Attends some of Kaprow’s informal Happenings.

Hangs untitled abstract canvases in former student Tom Doyle’s building so he can show them to Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Met, and Ivan Karp of Leo Castelli Gallery, but Doyle forgets to unlock the door to the building. Brings them to Leo Castelli Gallery and shows them to the dealer and his former wife, Ileana Sonnabend.

1961

January 1961

Shows Kaprow the semiabstract paintings with cartoon figures embedded in paint. He later recalls using these as drop cloths for his Pop paintings.

January 11–27, 1961

Exhibits twelve abstract ribbon paintings at Douglass College. One work is painted on several pieces of refrigerator-crate plywood nailed together.

February 1961

Meets Art Department secretary Letty Lou Eisenhauer.

June 1961

Tells Eisenhauer about his new painting Look Mickey. First Pop works demonstrate what the artist refers to as paintings without any expressionism in them. Pushes oil paint through the holes of a plastic dog-grooming brush without its bristles to create dot effect. Works feature blown-up versions of advertised consumer goods and other well-known characters including Popeye and Wimpy, as well as panels from the comic strips Buck Rogers, Steve Roper and Winnie Winkle. Experiments with other ways to apply dots, from using a lightly loaded paintbrush, which he drags over the canvas, to employing a small, square, handmade stencil made from thin aluminum with hand-drilled holes. Uses pre-primed white canvas. Flat areas are done in primary oil paint colors and outlined with black. Some paintings are done exclusively in black and white or blue and white. Creates several diptychs joined with hinges.

Works on a series of finished black-and-white drawings in pen, felt-tip marker, brush and india ink. Some feature pochoir, a stenciling technique of pushing india ink through a small metal grid.

Fall 1961

Kaprow arranges a meeting with Ivan Karp, director of Leo Castelli. Brings The Engagement Ring, Girl with Ball, Look Mickey and Step-on Can with Leg. Castelli contacts the artist several weeks later and agrees to represent him. In the meantime, Ileana Sonnabend visits the Highland Park studio with Billy Klüver. Irving Blum also visits. Sonnabend and Blum also offer to represent him.

Separates from Isabel.

September 22–October 14, 1961

Girl with Ball is added to Castelli’s show An Exhibition in Progress, the first public showing of one of his Pop works. The show’s concept is to start with a group of works and slowly replace them with Robert Rauschenberg’s works until it becomes a full Rauschenberg show, and then begin to slowly replace Rauschenberg’s works with others’ works until it turns back into a group show by the end of its run.

October 1961

Consigns first works for sale to Castelli, including Washing Machine, Emeralds, Roto Broil and Keds.

November 1961

Mr. Bellamy, Yellow Garbage Can, Red Flowers, Step-on Can with Leg, Black Flowers, I Can See the Whole Room! ... And There’s Nobody in It!, Girl and Rope Ladder, Cup of Coffee and Bread in Bag are sent to Castelli for sale.

November 9, 1961

Castelli sells his first work I Can See the Whole Room! ... And There’s Nobody in It! to Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine of Meriden, Connecticut.

November 30, 1961

New York collector Richard Brown Baker buys Washing Machine.

December 1961

A third wave of works is consigned to Castelli, including Turkey, Roller Skates, Electric Cord, Bathroom and Transistor Radio, which includes an actual aerial antenna.

December 12, 1961

Chicago collector Walter A. Netsch buys Black Flowers.

Meets Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Makes “duplicate” portraits of Kaprow and Karp.

Warhol takes his own paintings to Leo Castelli and shows them to Karp. Karp shows Warhol Girl with Ball.

Visits Warhol’s studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue in New York with Karp and sees Warhol’s comic-strip and consumer-goods paintings.

1962

Returns to live and work in Highland Park. 

Three works on paper Baked Potato (RLCR 672, RLCR 673 and RLCR 674) feature synthetic polymer paint, likely an acrylic paint, which was being introduced into his paintings on canvas.

Experiments with acrylic emulsion paint, in particular, Liquitex, but quickly abandons it for Magna, a polymer-based paint manufactured by Leonard Bocour that is soluble in turpentine but without the "yolky" or "milky" quality of Liquitex. Uses a Magna-based varnish between coats. Because Magna dries too quickly, continues to use oil paint for simulated Benday dots and, later, diagonals. Begins to use an industrial perforated metal screen, which he finds through the Beckley Perforating Co. in Garwood, N.J., for his Benday dots. Most works begin with colored pencil drawings to organize the material, done either sitting in a chair or at the drafting table. Enlarges drawings or sometimes even the source on the canvas using a Postoscope projector which he then redraws using a rotating easel or mirror to further abstract the image. Pencil marks unerased in earlier works begin to disappear entirely from compositions.

Close cropping of imagery appears.

First paintings based on panels from All-American Men of War comics, such as Blam and Takka Takka. The five-panel work Live Ammo features one diptych and three other panels (RLCR 706, RLCR 707 and RLCR 709); the painting is later broken up and sold as four individual works.

First paintings based on reproductions of works by Picasso and Cézanne, as well as Portrait of Madame Cézanne, an enlarged version of a black-and-white outline diagram by Cézanne scholar Erle Loran.

Isolates the words Art and In on canvas. Later recalls wanting to make one with the word 'Flat' but soon abandons the idea.

Makes first commissioned print, On, for Klüver and noted Dada and Surrealist expert Arturo Schwarz for The International Anthology of Contemporary Engravings: The International Avant-Garde: America Discovered, Volume 5 (Galleria Schwartz, Milan). Published in 1964, the portfolio also contains Warhol’s first print.

Switches from ink to pencil for finished black-and-white drawings. Develops a frottage technique for black-and-white drawings by placing a sheet of paper on a window screen and rubbing it with graphite to achieve the look of machine-applied dots. Finished drawings often depict subjects different from those in paintings and do not require preliminary sketches. Simultaneously works on paintings and these drawings in no clear chronological order.

February 10–March 3, 1962

First solo show of paintings at Leo Castelli.

February 26, 1962

Newsweek magazine reviews Leo Castelli show and reproduces Girl with Ball.

March 1962

Is linked for the first time with Dine, Oldenburg and James Rosenquist as a cohesive group (together with Peter Sau and Watts) in Max Kozloff’s article, "Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians," in Art International.

April 1962

Donald Judd reviews Leo Castelli show for Arts Magazine.

April 3–May 13, 1962

The Kiss is included in 1961, a group exhibition at Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, curated by Douglas MacAgy.

May 1962

Consigns a number of black-and-white pencil drawings to Castelli.

May 26–June 30, 1962

Black-and-white drawings are shown for the first time in Drawings at Leo Castelli.

June 15, 1962

Among several artists featured in "Something New Is Cooking" in Life magazine.

August 6–31, 1962

Art of Two Ages: The Hudson River School and Roy Lichtenstein at Mi Chou Gallery in New York features Pop paintings along with paintings by Albert Bierstadt, John William Casilear, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey and Asher B. Durand. Mi Chou Gallery borrowed the nineteenth-century works from Kennedy Galleries in New York.

September 25–October 19, 1962

Comic-strip and consumer-goods paintings are shown on the West Coast for the first time in the group exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps.

October 24–November 7, 1962

Included in Art 1963: A New Vocabulary, organized by Joan Kron and Audrey Sabol for the Art Council of the YM/YWHA in Philadelphia, featuring paintings, collages, assemblages, combines and machines by Brecht, Dine, Johns, Kaprow, Marisol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Segal, Jean Tinguely and Watts. Exhibition brochure includes statements by the artists and a dictionary of terms written by Klüver to describe the new art. Contributes a handwritten word balloon with the words, "DYNAMIC: KPOW! WHUMP! TAKKA TAKKA!! VAROOM!" to the catalogue.

October 31–December 1, 1962

Included in Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition New Realists, featuring "factual paintings and sculpture" by American and European artists, along with Dine, Yves Klein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Mimmo Rotella, Segal, Tinguely and Warhol.¹¹Janis 1962

November 1962

Included in Artnews essay, "The New American 'Sign Painters,'" by Gene R. Swenson, along with Dine, Stephen Durkee, Robert Indiana, Rosenquist, Richard Smith and Warhol.

Work is included for the first time as part of MoMA’s Art Lending Service.

November 18–December 15, 1962

Takka Takka is included in My Country ’Tis of Thee at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, along with works by Indiana, Johns, Edward Kienholz, Marisol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Rosenquist, Warhol and Tom Wesselmann.

Head: Red and Yellow is acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

December 4, 1962

On "The Unpopular Artist in a Popular Society" panel held in New York.

December 13, 1962

Attends symposium on Pop art at MoMA. Speakers include Dore Ashton, Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Stanley Kutz and Leo Steinberg, with Peter Selz as moderator. "Pop" art is chosen as name for the new movement. Other artists in the audience include Duchamp, Maciunas, Rosenquist and Warhol.

December 26, 1962

Among eleven artists chosen to create an outdoor mural for Johnson’s Theaterama building, part of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, 1964–65.

1963

Begins group of canvases depicting women from the DC Comics' Girls’ Romances and Secret Hearts series. Benday dots are doubled in areas, such as lips, by shifting the screen. Some are done in red and blue to create the effect of purple. Several canvases feature mad scientists from science fiction comic books.

Hires assistant to paint in Benday dots.

Begins to use lithographic rubbing crayon in his finished black-and-white drawings to achieve larger, more uniform, machine-looking dots.

Moves for a brief period of time into a studio on Broad Street near Coenties Slip, his first studio in New York

March 14–June 12, 1963

Included in Six Painters and the Object at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, organized by Lawrence Alloway, along with Dine, Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Warhol. The show travels throughout the United States.

April 1963

Three paintings are included in Pop! Goes the Easel at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, organized by MacAgy.

April 1–20, 1963

First exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, featuring works from 1961–63.

April 18–June 2, 1963

Included in The Popular Image at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, organized by Alice Denney.

April 28–May 26, 1963

Leo Castelli lends Girl at Piano and Magnifying Glass for Popular Art: Artistic Projections of Common American Symbols at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City.

May 10–June 20, 1963

Included in first European group show, De A à Z: 31 Peintures américains choisis par The Art Institute of Chicago, at the American Cultural Center in Paris.

May 17, 1963

Time magazine publishes a letter by William Overgard stating that I Can See the Whole Room! ... And There’s Nobody in It! is taken from the last panel of his August 6, 1961, comic strip Steve Roper. Overgard’s panel and the painting are reproduced side by side.

June 1963

Commissioned by poet Walasse Ting to contribute a piece for the cover of his collection of writing entitled 1¢ Life.

June 5–30, 1963

First solo exhibition in Europe, at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris. Trip to Paris for the opening is first time back since the war.

Summer–Winter 1963

Works are included in shows in Lausanne, Toronto, London, Turin and Gstaad.

Summer 1963

Brings the family to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spends time with Karp and his family.

Takes leave of absence from Douglass College.

September 28–October 24, 1963

Second solo exhibition at Leo Castelli.

October 1963

First of a series of major interviews conducted by John Coplans appears in Artforum.

October 1, 1963

Sells Highland Park home. Separates from Isabel, who moves with the children to Princeton.

Moves with Eisenhauer to the second floor of 36 W. 26th Street, which doubles as a studio.

October 24–November 23, 1963

Pop works are shown for the first time in Britain in The Popular Image at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, organized by Alan Solomon.

November 1963

Swenson publishes "What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part I: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol," in Artnews.

Featured speaker for a session entitled "'Sign' Painters" for the eighteenth annual design conference of the American Society of Industrial Designers at the Waldorf Astoria.

November 19–December 15, 1963

Included in Mixed Media and Pop Art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, organized by Gordon M. Smith, along with Dine, Johns, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Warhol, as well as lesser-known artists in the museum’s collection.

Completes first work in Magna on Plexiglas. Makes several more on plastic, which appeals to interest in achieving an "antiseptical industrial look."¹²Oral history interview with Roy Lichtenstein, November 15, 1963–January 15, 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Conducted by Richard Baker Brown.]

1964

January 31, 1964

Life magazine publishes article entitled "Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?" The idea comes from author Dorothy Seiberling, who at the time was married to Leo Steinberg. Both are supporters of the artist, who approves of the idea for the title.

Begins to prime own canvases by wiping them with tape to remove lint and applying two thin coats of gesso and one thin coat of white underpainting.

Makes full-scale canvases of composition notebooks and works that bear close resemblance to Mondrian’s abstractions.

Begins to make Benday dots larger, in proportion to the size of canvases.

Creates a series of frightened and crying women in close-up views.

Dialogue balloons begin to disappear from paintings.

Employs an airbrush for the first and only time to create Duridium, which depicts a razor blade.

Begins series of cartoon-style landscapes and seascapes inspired by cartoon backgrounds. Creates first sunrise and sunset works. Increasingly invents own subject matter.

Buys several mannequin heads and paints one like a cartoon girl.

April 1964

Invited by National Cartoonists Society in New York to talk about work.

His cover design for Art in America features a "pop panorama" drawing of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair.¹³Table of Contents, Art in America 52, no. 2 (April 1964).

April 22, 1964

New York World’s Fair Mural (Girl in Window) is among the murals featured at the New York State Pavilion at the New York State Fair.

Spring 1964

Meets Dorothy Herzka (b. 1939) at Paul Bianchini Gallery in New York (16 E. 78th St.) during preparations for American Supermarket, organized by Ben Birillo.

Introduced to a polycarbonate optical paper, Rowlux, by Jerry Foyster, and soon experiments with it in collages.

With help from Birillo, fabricates first enamel pieces on butcher trays featuring a red-and-white image of a hot dog. Creates first enamel edition, Hot Dog, inspired by the enameled look of a Good Humor truck and subway signs.

Seeks out ARPOR (Architectural Porcelain Fabricators, Inc.) in Orangeburg, New York, to create enameled works featuring cloudscapes, sunrises and scenes of girls based on comic-book panels.

June 1964

Included in Bruce Glaser roundtable radio discussion on New York WBAI that includes Oldenburg and Warhol. The transcript is later published in Artforum.

June 30, 1964

Resigns from Douglass College.

October 6, 1964

Grand opening of American Supermarket, which includes works by a number of artists. Visitors can buy items and put them in shopping bags that feature either Lichtenstein's image of a Thanksgiving turkey or Warhol's Campbell’s tomato soup. The show eventually travels to Rome and Venice.

October 24–November 19, 1964

Temple of Apollo, employing a classical art reference, is shown at Leo Castelli, along with other landscapes.

October 31, 1964

Attends Idelle Weber’s Halloween party on Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights dressed as Warhol with Herzka dressed as Edie Sedgwick.

November 24, 1964

Solo exhibition of landscapes and girls at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. 

December 7, 1964

Makes Spear-Bearer costume in which he performs with Eisenhauer and others in Dick Higgins’s opera Hrušalk at the Café au Go Go in New York.

Klüver and Schwarz publish The International Anthology of Contemporary Engravings: The International Avant-Garde: America Discovered, Volume 5 (Galleria Schwarz, Milan).

Rosa Esman begins Tanglewood Press with the portfolio New York Ten, which includes Seascape (1), his first color screenprint on Rowlux.

Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Curator of Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, invites him to contribute a screenprint that he makes on clear plastic entitled Sandwich and Soda to the portfolio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters). Ugo Mulas photographs him in the studio working on the print. An edition is sent to the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.

1965

Officially separates from Isabel.

Begins collaboration with Rutgers colleague and potter Hui Ka Kwong to create a series of ceramic heads and another of stacked cups and saucers based on diner cutlery and glassware. Molds for the dishes are purchased from Stewart Clay Company and Holland Mold Company, both in New York. Employs decals of ceramic dots which he has commercially silk-screened which can be cut to the desired configurations. For heads he devises punched-out tape stencils for Hui to spray color through evenly to their contours. Black lines are painted by hand. Uses gold and silver paint in several ceramics featuring teapots.

John Rublowsky’s Pop Art: Images of the American Dream, the first book devoted to the movement, includes Ken Heyman’s photo of the artist unrolling Look Mickey in his studio.

Experiments with Modern motifs in poster of the World’s Fair for the National Cartoonists Society entitled This Must Be the Place.

Dealers Marian Goodman, Ursula Kalish and Sunny Sloane, along with art consultant and framer Barbara Kulicke, establish Multiples, Inc., for editioned pieces of art. They had already opened the Betsy Ross Flag and Banner Company in 1962 with Robert Graham of New York’s Graham Gallery to produce banners by artists. Pistol Banner is the most popular and sells out.

Founded by Daniel Spoerri, Èdition MAT in Paris publishes the artist's boxed Rowlux entitled Seascape (II) in the portfolio Collection 65.

February 1965

Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam purchases As I Opened Fire....

March 13, 1965

Contributes to the Artist’s Key Club, a Happening orchestrated by Arman, where 104 keys to 104 Penn Station lockers are sold at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Each locker has one signed work or one small gift by the participating artists. Contributes four signed drawings, including Kiss V (Study), No Thank You! (Study) and Ocean.

April 1965

Creates three screenprints, Moonscape, Reverie and Sweet Dreams, Baby!, commissioned by Philip Morris, for 11 Pop Artists, Volume 1, II–III.

May 22–23, 1965

Participates in the planned group swim with other artists at the conclusion of Oldenburg’s Happening, Washes, at Al Roon’s Health Club in New York.

June 1, 1965

Second solo show at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris. Eisenhauer wears a dress designed by Leigh Rudd based on one of his Sunrises for the opening reception.

Fall 1965

First Brushstrokes painting is inspired by an image of a painted brushstroke from a science fiction comic-strip panel. Other invented Brushstroke works follow.

November 20–December 11, 1965

Castelli presents the Brushstrokes along with recent ceramic pieces.

December 7–31, 1965

Teardrop Pendant depicting a crying girl is shown at Multiples, Inc.

Enameled works feature sunrises and cartoon-inspired imagery, including cartoon explosions in various primary colors, which appear in the first large-scale group of porcelain enamel on steel wall- and standing-sculptures with perforated metal screens.

1966

Creates paintings featuring drips and blots of paint against a graph-paper grid background.

Begins to add surplus Hansen motors to the back of his Rowlux seascapes to simulate the waves of an ocean. Adds specially made light fixtures fabricated by Grand Lighting in Brooklyn to others whose painted bulb casings rotate through a spectrum of color gels to simulate different times of day. Many light fixtures are later removed and discarded because of breakage and the difficulties in running them.

Moves to 190 Bowery at Spring Street. Sets up a residence and studio on the fourth floor of the former German bank built in 1917. The studio is better lit, thanks to two large walls of windows that look out onto the Bowery. Adolph Gottlieb lives on the second floor, and Malcolm Morley, Louise Nevelson and Mark Rothko live in the neighborhood.

February 1966

Contributes Atom Burst to the project Artists' Tower of Protest, which included a central steel structure designed by Mark di Suvero.

March 6–April 2, 1966

In Caracas, Venezuela, promoting Jacinto Quirarte’s show Pop Art: La Nueva Imagen, sponsored by Tabacalera Nacional/Philip Morris International.

April 15, 1966

On Pop art symposium panel with Larry Rivers and Frank Stella, sponsored by the San Francisco Art Institute.

April 27, 1966

Gala opening of Artists for CORE: Fifth Annual Art Exhibition and Sale at Grippi and Waddell, New York, which includes his limited-edition button featuring an apple core inside a painter’s palette.

Summer 1966

Designs a limited-edition deluxe print on silver foil along with a larger commercial run of posters, based on 1930s Hollywood motifs, for Lincoln Center’s fourth New York Film Festival.

June 18–October 16, 1966

Together with Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly and Jules Olitski, represents the United States at the 33rd Venice Biennale in an exhibition organized by Henry Geldzahler. Travels to Venice for the opening.

October 1, 1966

Six-piece table setting of signed black-and-white china pieces produced by Jackson China Company for Durable Dish Company sold at Leo Castelli.

November 29, 1966

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents first solo museum exhibition, Works by Roy Lichtenstein, organized by Ed Henning.

Paul Potash assists at the studio one day a week and learns how to construct the floor-to-ceiling easels. Hires Jerry Simon as assistant.

December 1966

Tate Gallery, London, purchases Whaam!

1967

The Modern series emphasizes double-density dots more than in the lips or eyes of Pop-based work, where dots touch tangentially to create a white star in the middle.

Mulas’s images of the artist appear in Alan Solomon’s book New York: The New Art Scene.

March 23, 1967

Divorce from Isabel is finalized.

April 1967

“How an Elvis Presley Becomes a Roy Lichtenstein” by Salvador Dalí appears in Arts Magazine.

April 13, 1967

A poster billboard reproducing the painting RLCR 995 is unveiled at the corner of La Cienega Blvd. and Melrose Ave. in Los Angeles, announcing a show at the Pasadena Art Museum. Foster and Kleiser Outdoor Advertising produced the 30-sheet posters as a donation to the Pasadena Art Museum.

April 18–May 28, 1967

Pasadena Art Museum, in collaboration with the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, presents first traveling retrospective, organized by Coplans. The first solo exhibition catalogue is published.

April 24, 1967

Interview conducted by David Sylvester in January 1966 airs on BBC Third Programme as "Roy Lichtenstein Talks To David Sylvester," for the series "Ten American Artists."

April 28–October 29, 1967

Mural Big Modern Painting for Expo ’67 in American Painting Now at the Expo ’67 US Pavilion in Montreal, which features graduated Benday dots.

Summer 1967

Rents Rivers’s house in Southampton, New York, with friends.

Works with Hollander Workshop in New York to produce his lithograph Explosion for Portfolio 9.

August 17–20, 1967

Artist-in-residence under the auspices of the Aspen Center for Contemporary Art, along with Allan D’Arcangelo, Les Levine, Robert Morris, Oldenburg and DeWain Valentine. They conceive of a  Culture-In series of events that includes a black-and-white taped and painted environment entitled Room in the studio space on the second floor of the Brand Building. The installation is meant for destruction, although a door with the words "Nok!! Nok!!" is dismantled and saved with the artist’s permission.

Fall 1967

Collaborates with Guild Hall in Paramus, New Jersey, to fabricate sculptures made of brass, mirror, tinted glass, marble, aluminum and wood.

September 1967

Submits Illustration for "Romanze, or The Music Students" (I) and Illustration for "Romanze, or The Music Students" (II) for In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems by Frank O’Hara, an unbound book (2,500 numbered on colophon page) of two musically derived Modern images drawn on a plastic surface. Edited by Bill Berkson, the works are done in honor of O’Hara, an assistant curator at MoMA who had died tragically.

November 1967

Super Sunset Billboard is installed on Sabol’s handball court in Villanova, Pennsylvania. Covering six plywood panels and painted by hand, it is later destroyed.

November 4–December 17, 1967

Stedelijk Museum presents first European retrospective. The show travels to three other museums, including Tate Gallery in 1968. It is the Tate’s first show dedicated to a living American artist.

Appointed Regents Professor, University of California, Irvine.

Begins first Stretcher Frame paintings.

1968

January 1968

Hires Carlene Meeker as assistant. Her first task is to scrape off the dots incorrectly applied by one of his former assistants and repaint them; she stays on for twelve years. Often works on fifteen to twenty paintings at a time.

January 4, 1968

Arrives in London for opening of Tate retrospective. Travels to Morocco with family after opening festivities.

Makes first Modular paintings featuring repeated design imagery, inspired by an art project completed in third or fourth grade.

May 24, 1968

Commissioned image of Robert F. Kennedy appears on cover of Time magazine.

June 1968

Invited by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) curator Maurice Tuchman to participate in forthcoming Art and Technology exhibition. Is paired with Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

Creates Modern Head Pendant, an enamel brooch, which is sold by Multiples, Inc.

June 21, 1968

Time magazine features his rendering of a gun for its cover story, "The Gun in America."

Summer 1968

Visits the Pasadena Art Museum with Coplans and sees Constructivist paintings of heads by German Expressionist artist Alexei Jawlensky. Coplans discusses his ideas for an exhibition on serial paintings. Creates first paintings on the theme of Claude Monet’s Haystacks. Continues making works featuring Art Deco and stretcher bar imagery.

Purchases a shared house on Wooley Street in Southampton with friends.

August 1968

Paper boat Hat is included in S.M.S., no. 4, a portfolio of artists’ works edited by William Copley and Dimitri Petrov.

September 1968

Joins artists’ boycott of Chicago museums over the police action during the Democratic National Convention.

September 10, 1968

Appointed Fellow for Life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

September 12, 1968

Tours Universal City Studios.

September 17–October 27, 1968

Sees Coplans’s exhibition Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum. Begins series of Rouen Cathedrals.

October 1968

Submits a collage for Modern Painting for New York State Mural (Town and Country), an unrealized mural for the New York State Legislature Building commissioned by the Empire State Plaza Art Commission.

October 22–November 23, 1968

Charles E. Slatkin Galleries debuts wool tapestry featuring a Modern version of a classical Greek head.

October 23, 1968

Invited by prominent Chicago dealer Richard Feigen to contribute a work to monthlong protest exhibition Richard J. Daley.

November 1, 1968

Marries Herzka.

November 1968

Commissioned to make movie poster for Joanna; it is reproduced in black-and-white newspaper ads but never distributed.

Designs wrapping paper sold at On 1st; Paper Plate is one of the first to use the reflective motif.

Commissioned to create an editioned sculpture to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of both the US Postal Service and International Airmail Service, Salute to Airmail.

Richard Kalina begins as studio assistant.

December 1968

Richard Dimmler begins as studio assistant.

1969

Winter/Spring 1969

Abandons metal screens and begins to use red oilboard perforated sheets he orders from Beckley, which are easier to manipulate. Haystack and Rouen Cathedral canvases are aided by assistants who must meticulously cut out wax paper stencils using a single-edge razor blade and lay them onto the canvases with double-sided tape. Directs the dotting process, which is painstaking. Next, a brayer is used to apply paint. Then applies a standard three coats of Magna paint, the black, to finish up a line, working from thin to thick. If unhappy with the result, can wipe away the Magna with turpentine, since the alcohol-based varnish protects the layer underneath, which allows for a very flexible system.

January–July, 1969

Issues first serial prints (seven Haystack and six Rouen Cathedral lithographs) through Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, collaborating with master printer Kenneth Tyler.

Kalina leaves.

February 3, 1969

Returns for a two-week stay at Universal City Studios, after which decides to make "moving pictures." Sketches fifteen landscape pictures in total, which would combine filmed sequences with other synthetic material separated by a heavy black horizontal line that would rock back and forth.

Photographed by Lord Snowdon in his Bowery studio with Pyramid paintings and several Modern works; photographs appear in Vogue magazine in September.

Summer 1969

Stays on Wooley Street in Southampton again with friends. With the assistance of filmmaker Joel L. Freedman of Cinnamon Productions Inc., shoots 35mm film of the sunrise and sunset in Montauk using a high-powered telescope attached to a Bolex camera. The resulting footage is too shaky to use. Over the course of the year, they experiment with shooting footage of rippling ocean water under Benday dot props. Not satisfied with the results, plans are altered to create three  filmed vignettes that mirror the precision and clarity of his paintings. With Freedman, seeks out special-effects expert Hugo Casolaro, who collaborates on animating both the color and imagery of the final product, entitled Three Landscapes, 1970–71.

Fall 1969

Creates first Mirror paintings, inspired by the airbrushed quality of mirror sales catalogues. Begins to photograph own source material, such as magnifying mirrors that produce abstract shadows and shapes.

September 23, 1969

Buys carriage house in Southampton.

September 19–November 9, 1969

First New York retrospective of paintings and sculptures, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, organized by Diane Waldman. The show travels to four other US museums.

1970

March 15–September, 1970

Two landscape films are shown on 7-by-11-foot screens using 35 mm film loop rear-screen projectors at the Expo ’70 US Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. The artist does not travel to Japan to see the installation.

Summer 1970

Moves into Southampton house with plans for a studio on the third floor, but ceilings turn out to be substantially lower than expected.

Creates Modern Head, first brass relief, in an edition of 100 for sale by Gemini G.E.L.

October 1970

Signs first realized large Brushstrokes mural—12 by 245 feet on four continuous walls—at the University of Düsseldorf School of Medicine.

Bianchini publishes the first monograph cataloguing most of his drawings and prints.

1971

Begins Entablature series in black and white using own photographs of Wall Street’s neoclassical buildings as sources, which are inspired by the background decorative dividers in works by Cubist painters such as Picasso and Georges Braque.

March 13–April 8, 1971

Mirrors exhibited publicly for the first time at Leo Castelli.

May 10–August 29, 1971

Three Landscapes, which features an additional film loop along with the two shown in Osaka, is shown in 16mm format in Art and Technology at LACMA. Once again, the artist does not see the final installation.

May 12, 1971

Inducted as a fellow into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston).

September 1971

Castelli opens a new gallery at 420 W. Broadway in SoHo.

Designs a poster for UNICEF child-welfare programs, Save Our Planet Save Our Water, to raise ecological awareness. It references fish in an aquarium similar to his third and final film loop shown at LACMA.

Lithograph Mao accompanies Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. The lithograph is packed in a specially designed container that acts as its frame and includes Tuten’s signed and numbered book on the reverse.

Designs his studio in Southampton across the lawn from the house as a classic saltbox, with skylights. Replicates easel walls of wooden racks and clamps.

Harry N. Abrams publishes first monograph of his paintings and sculpture, written by Waldman. Italian and German editions are also published that same year.

1972

John Coplans edits Documentary Monographs in Modern Art series monograph.

Begins Still Life series.

Increasingly uses diagonal stripes in place of Benday dots.

Begins to quote own work in Still Life paintings.

References to Matisse appear in works.

October 1972

Serves as visual consultant to Frank Perry’s film Play It as It Lays, based on a novel by Joan Didion.

James dePasquale begins as studio assistant in Southampton; Dimmler leaves.

1973

Begins series of trompe l’oeil and Cubist still lifes, which includes his take on their use of faux-bois, but which also mimics Rowlux.

Channels the work of Morris Louis in a collage and then a painting, Unfurled (After Morris Louis).

Fall 1973

Begins Artist’s Studio works, incorporating self-quotations of early 1960s paintings and drawings. Includes references to abstract-style paintings, precursors to a group of Perfect/Imperfect works.

Creates paintings showing the influence of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Picasso’s Bulls become a particular theme in graphic work.

1974

Paints first works influenced by Italian Futurism.

Begins new series of Entablatures using metallic and pastel colors. Mixes sand with paint to highlight surface texture.

October 7, 1974

Modern Head, the first large-scale sculpture in metal, wood and polyurethane, is assembled on site at Fashion Park, Santa Anita Shopping Center, Arcadia, California.

1975

January 10–February 17, 1975

Centre Beaubourg in Paris organizes first traveling retrospective of drawings.

Begins series of paintings based on works by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant.

1976

Paints Office Still Lifes based on newspaper illustrations of office items and business furniture.

Completes final series of Entablature paintings.

Creates several self-portraits in Futurist style.

Warhol creates a screenprint portrait of him.

Makes first painted sculptures in bronze of mirrors, coffee cups and drinking glasses. Uses the lost wax process, in which rubber molds encased in ceramic are made from his wooden maquettes, and wax is then steamed out and bronze poured into the mold. Bronze is patinated black, and colored areas are created using a brand of polyurethane anti-aircraft paint called Bostic, often in combination with Magna.

Produces bicentennial poster for the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.

1977

Begins series of paintings based on works by Surrealist artists (including Dalí, Max Ernst and Miró) and Surrealist works by Picasso, some featuring a dialogue balloon.

Olivia Motch is administrative assistant.

March 1977

Commissioned by BMW to create an exterior design for their 320i race car, driven later in the year at Le Mans. They send a plastic mold, which he returns in April with a design of a sunrise.

April 26, 1977

Receives Skowhegan Medal for Painting and Sculpture.

May 13, 1977

Is awarded doctorate in fine arts from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

1978

January 12, 1978

Creates Airplane, 1977, for American poet Kenneth Koch’s novel-turned-play The Red Robins. Production also included the use of the authorized replica, Airplane (Replica).

North American Indian motifs reappear.

May 1978

First large-scale outdoor sculpture, Lamp, in welded painted bronze with painted brass light rays fabricated by Tallix, is commissioned by Gilman Paper Company, St. Mary’s, Georgia, and installed in front of its main administrative building (later deinstalled).

July 19–September 24, 1978

Contributes cover design for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Art about Art, organized by Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall.

Visits Los Angeles. Sees the Robert Gore Rifkind collection of German Expressionist graphic art.

November 12–26, 1978

Invited by Anand Sarabhai to visit his home in Ahmedabad, India, designed by Le Corbusier for Anand’s mother, Manorama Sarabhai. There, makes several textile works on canvas and Mirrors in sandstone and marble. Prepares teakwood blocks for Goldfish Bowl, Lamp and Picture and Pitcher but is unable to print them because blocks are warped. Prints them in 1981 after Tyler Graphics fixes them.

1979

Makes last Surrealist-inspired works.

Begins German Expressionist–inspired works based on paintings and woodcuts by artists such as Erich Heckel, Franz Marc and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

March 1979

Outdoor public sculpture commission, Mermaid, is installed. The 24-foot-high painted steel work fabricated by Tallix is poised on three concrete waves in a fountain pool. A live palm tree planted near the head of the sculpture completes the ensemble.

May 1979

Awarded honorary doctorate in fine arts from Southampton College in New York.

May 23, 1979

Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (elevated in 1993 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, New York).

July 11, 1979

London premiere of BBC profile re-creates Bowery studio, and films him at work in the Southampton studio.

October 25, 1979

Designs Untitled Shirt using mirror motif in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, for Artist Space’s sixth-anniversary fundraising party at the Mudd Club.

1980

Makes numerous Expressionist Heads in sculpture and on canvas, along with Expressionist-inspired Nudes in Landscape paintings.

Combines loosely painted brushstrokes with constructed Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes in series of single and grouped apple drawings and several canvases based on the conceit of cartoon-style brushwork.

Creates an American Flag canvas DEST (RL 0845), which he later destroys.

July 1980

Sketches some designs for a tea set commissioned by Rosenthal GmbH, Selb, Germany; the edition is completed in late 1984.

September 25, 1980

Isabel Lichtenstein (1921–80) dies.

1981

May 8–June 28, 1981

Exhibition of paintings and sculptures from the period 1970–80 at Saint Louis Art Museum, organized by Jack Cowart; the show travels to museums in the United States, Europe and Japan.

October 4–November 25, 1981

Whitney Museum’s downtown branch on Wall Street showcases graphic work from the 1970s.

October 17–November 7, 1981

Leo Castelli presents new works, featuring renditions of apples on canvas.

Painting a small sketch on acetate projected onto canvas, creates four Woman paintings using modified Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes based on Willem de Kooning’s third Woman series from the late 1950s. Other subjects include apples, sailboats and forest scenes. Before Magna is applied, uses collaged cutouts of painted brushstrokes to determine the final composition and palette.

1982

January–February, 1982

Travels to Egypt.

April 1, 1982

Participates in roundtable discussion for exhibition Roy Lichtenstein at Colorado State University.

June 1982

Submits three-dimensional maquette for tallest sculpture to date, Brushstrokes in Flight, to a national competition sponsored by the City of Columbus for an international airport.

Sets up studio at 105 E. 29th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue, next to the Hotel Deauville, on the seventh floor.

Begins series of paintings incorporating a frame motif, and Paintings and Two Paintings series, in which two contrasting images are ambiguously linked by a single or hybrid frame motif. Reference to Johns’s flagstones appears in one canvas.

August 8–September 19, 1982

Look Mickey, Popeye and Wimpy (Tweet) are exhibited for the first time at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton.

1983

Winter 1983

Petersburg Press publishes Seven Apples, a series of seven-color woodcuts.

March 1983

Selected to design, execute and install Brushstrokes in Flight near the central courtyard at the airport entrance. In June 1985, it is moved indoors for better visibility.

March 21, 1983

Poster for UN Special Committee Against Apartheid is published by Galerie Maeght-Lelong in Paris.

October 4–December 4, 1983

Contributes design to Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival.

Publication of monograph by Alloway. Includes "Notes on Technique."

November 1983

Begins 96-foot-long mural on the wall of Castelli’s Greene Street gallery space, a compilation of many motifs including those from earlier works. Robert McKeever works on Greene Street Mural and eventually becomes part-time studio assistant in New York. The painted and collaged mural is only meant to exist from the time it opens to the public on December 3 until January 14, 1984, when it is covered over with sheet rock. The mural is fully destroyed when Castelli closes the gallery space in the fall of 1988.

Designs logo for the Visual Arts Center at OSU.

1984

Returns to New York part-time to live and work on E. 29th Street. The east wall has a Formica surface that he can draw on or tape things to, and it has windows along the north and south. Big paintings are difficult to fit in the elevator. Paints an image of Swiss cheese on elevator doors.

McKeever works part time as studio assistant until the end of 1985 and thereafter full time.

Spring 1984

Joins board of directors of the Studio in a School Association, a not-for-profit organization that brings art experiences and artists to New York City public elementary schools.

May 3, 1984

Commissioned to create a mural for the lobby of the Equitable Tower in midtown Manhattan. The skyscraper, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and developed by Tishman Speyer Properties, is completed in early 1986 and features a five-story skylit atrium. In December, the artist submits a study for Mural with Blue Brushstroke.

September 1984

Commission for a large-scale outdoor sculpture for the Walker Art Center.

September 20–December 2, 1984

Whitney Museum presents Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, organized by Barbara Haskell.

1985

In his studio on 29th Street creates the first of several American flag-like compositions from diagonals and Benday dots called Forms in Space in a variety of media.

May 31, 1985

Contributes a new print of the American flag for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania fundraising event called Rally 'Round the Flag.

November 21, 1985

Sketching for Mural with Blue Brushstroke begins on the wall of the Equitable Tower, and painting begins December 7.

Sketches out a logo for the Hampton Jitney Company for their "Riding the Wave" campaign. Logo appears on its buses beginning in 1989.

First Perfect Painting bearing the title.

1986

January 1986

Mural with Blue Brushstroke completed. References to Léger, Matisse, Stella, Johns, Entablatures and early Pop imagery as well as other art-historical motifs feature prominently in the final design.

February 15, 1986

Made from painted and fabricated aluminum and standing over 25 feet high, Salute to Painting is dedicated at the Walker Art Center.

Spring 1986

Makes Imperfect paintings, featuring compositions of generic geometric abstractions that feature a single line that bounces from one edge of the canvas to the other, sometimes breaking the boundary of the canvas.

Approached by Taittinger to design a bottle for their champagne. Result is introduced on October 16, 1990, in Paris. Some one thousand wine glasses with the same image are distributed with the bottle.

Tyler Graphics Ltd. publishes a series of hand-painted Brushstroke wall relief sculptures in cherry wood.

December 12, 1986

Begins work for the first time with Donald Saff, founder of Graphicstudio, located at the University of South Florida in Tampa, to publish two versions of his Brushstroke Chair and Brushstroke Ottoman, one in white birch veneer crafted by Beeken / Parsons in Shelburne, Vermont, and another in bronze from the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state.

1987

February 1987

Begins work at Gemini on Imperfect prints in which edges extend over the conventional print border. The prints are published the following year, each in an edition of 45.

February 2–March 5, 1987

Works with Graphicstudio to produce a series of waxtype prints featuring Brushstroke Faces that utilize beeswax instead of printer’s ink to create an encaustic finish.

March 15–June 2, 1987

MoMA mounts a major drawings retrospective, organized by Bernice Rose, the first show of drawings by a living artist ever presented by the museum. The show travels to museums in the United States, UK, Europe and Israel.

July 1987

Peter Littmann, Executive Director of Vorwerk & Co. Teppichwerke in Hameln, Germany, visits the artist to commission a design for a commercial wall-to-wall unlimited edition nylon carpet using no more than six colors and measuring four meters in width. Other artists commissioned include Sol LeWitt, Arata Isozaki, David Hockney, Jean Nouvel, Sam Francis, Zaha Hadid, Mimmo Paladino, Michael Graves and Richard Meier. Designs are submitted the following March.

Summer 1987

Designs the exterior of a mirrored glass labyrinth funhouse for André Heller’s traveling amusement park Luna Luna in Hamburg, with piped-in music by Philip Glass.

November 1987

Visits Israel for the first time for opening of drawings show at the Tel Aviv Museum. Discusses the possibility of a permanent mural for the museum with director Marc Scheps.

Creates diptychs Painting with Detail (Blue) and Painting with Detail (Black), in which a full field of blue and black Benday dots, respectively, appear alongside a much smaller counterpart.

A committee for the Lichtenstein Museum is inaugurated in St. Louis in the hope of renovating mansions in Oak Knoll Park in Clayton, Missouri, as a research and study center along with galleries that would feature changing exhibitions of varying themes related to the artist and his time. The project is never developed.

1988

Begins Reflections series in Southampton, incorporating quotations of both previously depicted and new comic strips, a motif not fully used since the 1960s. Comes upon the idea while trying to photograph a Rauschenberg print under glass.

Creates sculptures of heads in patinated bronze on the themes of the archaic and the surreal and those of Constantin Brancusi.

Returns to the idea of creating drawings in black and white.

Coups de pinceau, a 31-foot-high aluminum Brushstroke sculpture, is installed at Caisse des Dépôts in Paris.

First German-language monograph devoted to pre-Pop works is written by Ernst A. Busche.

Begins Plus and Minus works based on works by Mondrian.

Sketches curtain design for André Heller’s staging of Body and Soul (1988), a musical revival of the music, dance and spirituals of the thirties and forties. His curtain is used as the backdrop for the tour in the United States and Europe.

Sketchbook contains first image of a Virtual motif.

Commissioned to design a poster for the California campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

Spring 1988

Patricia Koch replaces Motch as administrative assistant.

May 1988

Sets up a studio and residence in a 1912 building at 745 Washington Street. A former steel fabricating business, it is renovated by architect David Piscuskas of the firm 1100 Architect. Constructs his wooden easel walls around the perimeter. Divides time between Southampton and Manhattan.

June 1988

Receives honorary doctorate in humanities from OSU.

November 16, 1988–May 31, 1989

Brushstroke Group, a 30-foot-high painted aluminum sculpture, is installed in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Manhattan as part of the Public Art Fund’s project to install temporary sculptures on public sites in New York.

Designs second shopping bag, produced by Dayton Hudson Department Store Company, to celebrate the inauguration of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in cooperation with the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. The bag features Brushstrokes on a field of Plus and Minus imagery.

1989

March 15–May 15, 1989

Artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Sees highway sign advertising furniture, which spurs him to look through the Rome yellow pages for similar imagery. Begins thinking about doing a series of Interiors based on findings.

April 8–14, 1989

Travels with studio assistants to Tel Aviv to begin work on a large mural for the entrance hall of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Signs the completed mural on May 7.

Summer 1989

Begins work on Bauhaus Stairway Mural for a building designed by I. M. Pei for Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills and commissioned by collector and agency founder Michael Ovitz.

June 1989

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York (MTA) to create Times Square Mural at the subway station at 42nd Street and Times Square. Plan is scrapped, but decides to fabricate the sixteen panels of porcelain enamel on steel. In 2002 they are posthumously installed by Polich ArtWorks for the MTA Arts for Transit program. They feature science fiction themes in a Buck Rogers futuristic style similar in feel to the 1964 Art in America panorama cover illustration and the 1965 print This Must Be the Place.

October 1989

Begins joint project with Philip Glass on a hand-cast bronze, copper and wood music box, Modern Love Waltz. The piece is fabricated by Peter Carlson Enterprises in Sun Valley, California, and issued by The Object of Art (Grinstein/Donenfeld Limited Edition Fine Art Objects), Santa Monica, California, in December of 1991.

Continues to create Reflections which feature numerous untitled abstractions as well more figurative ones with Wonder Woman, Dagwood, Donald Duck and Nancy—in homage to Warhol’s early painting of the comic heroine. Tyler Graphics begins work on prints in the series, which are published the following year.

Time magazine reissues his image of Bobby Kennedy and The Gun in America as prints, each done only in an edition of 2 and given to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., where they joined the original drawings and overlays used to produce the covers.

First colored pencil drawing of an Interior.

Fall 1989

Discussions with Gemini about creating a print series of Interiors. One work features a portrait of Mao that references both his early work and Warhol’s. Another features Dagwood Bumstead’s living room.

First Mobile in painted and patinated bronze fabricated by Tallix. Four others are produced the following years, and another bronze Landscape Mobile is produced in 1991.

1990

Winter 1990

Begins Interiors group of works. The preparatory drawings are predominantly executed on polyester tracing film. Paints for the first time with sponges to create faux texture. Many feature paintings hanging on walls that the artist wanted to try out but not paint as full-fledged works. Uses the conceit of a room corner in most compositions.

January 1990

Commissioned by composer Steve Reich to create a cover design for recording called The Four Sections. The cover and accompanying promotional poster are published by Elektra Entertainment, New York, the following year.

Sherrie Levine appropriates several of his comic-strip paintings and prints in her 1990 mixed-media work Collage/Cartoon.

Summer 1990

Laurie Lambrecht begins to work part time in New York and Southampton, replacing Koch.

June 1990

Works again with Saff at his new shop Saff Tech in Oxford, Maryland, to create a bas-relief, Suspended Mobile, and Water Lily prints based on Monet’s late Water Lilies. Creates six in enamel which feature a handmade swirling design on metal developed by Saff using a rubber drill bit. Designs individual wood frames for several of the enamel prints.

September 1990

Cassandra Lozano joins the New York studio full time, and Lambrecht begins to work in the summers only, until 1992.

October 7, 1990–January 15, 1991

Some comic-book sources are researched and shown for the first time in MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, an exhibition of twentieth-century art that includes source materials and related ephemera.

Creates costume designs for André Heller’s unrealized TV production of Aida, which was to star soprano Jessye Norman. The headdress and costume is later made for Heller’s opera Sein und Schein and worn by Maria Bill. The opera debuts in Salzburg, Vienna, at the Burgtheater on January 19, 1993. Also participating in the opera project are Mimmo Paladino, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.

Tallix produces two Mobiles in painted and patinated bronze as well as a new version of Airplane, an outdoor piece in bronze.

Artes Magnus in New York publishes a porcelain-and-cast-resin Landscape Mobile produced by Bernardaud in Limoges, France.

Produces the print Mirror with Gemini for the benefit of the Harvey Gantt for Senate Campaign.

1991

April 2–June 30, 1991

Two Interior paintings are included in Whitney Museum’s Biennial.

April 25, 1991

Receives Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award.

May 15–September 28, 1992

Ed. 1/2 of Modern Head, based on the 1974 wood sculpture RLCR 2318, is installed in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. 

October 1991

Creates a sculpture based on the image of an African mask in Interior with African Mask. It is fabricated at Tallix in versions of galvanized steel, tin-plated bronze, zinc-plated bronze and pewter.

Creates ten collage studies for screen prints to be illustrated in Nouvelle Chute de l’Amérique, a limited-edition unbound book published in 1992 by Les Éditions du Solstice to accompany eleven Allen Ginsberg poems under the title The Fall of America. Etchings and aquatints are pulled on a handpress at Atelier Dupont in Visat, Paris. Each edition is signed and numbered by both.

1992

June 1992

Approached by dealer Ronald Feldman to help fund-raise on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic senatorial campaigns. Creates a print of the Oval Office to benefit ten female senatorial candidates. A poster is also created.

June 12, 1992

Made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.

July 1992

Inspired by the work of Catalan artist Antoni Gaudí, creates Barcelona Head, a 64-foot-high sculpture made of colored ceramic tiles, commissioned for the summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. It is installed on the site of the former naval yard where Christopher Columbus docked his ships.

Creates an interior inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s bedroom paintings.

December 6, 1992–March 7, 1993

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62, organized by Paul Schimmel and Donna DeSalvo, devoted exclusively to the early years of the Pop art movement in the United States. Pre-1960s works such as Washington Crossing the Delaware I, and several semiabstract drawings of cartoon characters from 1958 are included. The show travels to two other US museums.

His print Rain Forest, initiated by Artists United for Nature, is included in the portfolio Columbus: In Search of a New Tomorrow to raise awareness and funds to protect the world’s tropical rainforests. It features his sponging technique.

1993

January 1993

Painting Oval Office is finished.

Spring 1993

Begins a series featuring comic-book females in the nude inspired by Picasso’s 1928 beach series. Graduated dots represent chiaroscuro.

April 1993

Begins work with Saff Tech on painted nickel-plated bronze Metallic Brushstroke Head.

May 1993

Produces cover and frontispiece for Tuten’s book, Tintin in the New World: A Romance (William Morrow), which features Tintin, a character created by Belgian artist Hergé.

July 9, 1993

Receives honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London.

July–August, 1993

Creates Large Interior with Three Reflections, a mural consisting of a 30-foot-long panel and three additional panels, for the Revlon Corporation in New York.

October 1993

Completes Brushstroke Nude, a 12-foot-high painted aluminum sculpture fabricated at Tallix.

October 7, 1993–January 16, 1994

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, a retrospective survey of paintings and sculpture. Designs cover for museum’s magazine. The exhibition travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museé des beaux-arts, Montreal; pre-Pop works are added to the venues at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. The tour concludes with a smaller exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio.

October 23–November 27, 1993

Premiers Tintin painting at Leo Castelli.

December 23, 1993

Receives Amici de Barcelona award from the Mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall.

1994

January 1994

Roy Lichtenstein: The Artist at Work (Lodestar) by Lou Ann Walker is published. Designed to teach children eight to twelve years old about art, it includes photos by Michael Abramson of the artist at work in his studio.

February 1994

Meets with Tyler at his shop to begin work on Nude prints.

August 1994

Donates designs for the hull and sail for a PACT 95 yacht, featuring an image of a mermaid on the hull and sun, clouds and water on the spinnaker.

Using machined aluminum, paint and wax, Saff Tech starts fabrication of his relief Woman Contemplating a Yellow Cup. That October they begin production on Imperfect Sculpture using stained cast iron and painted stainless steel plates.

October 1994

The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné by Mary Lee Corlett is published. The book appears in conjunction with the prints retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. The show later travels to LACMA, Dallas Museum of Art, and Parrish Art Museum.

November 19–December 17, 1994

First series of Nudes is shown at Leo Castelli.

1995

January 1995–March 1996

Works with Gemini on prints showcasing a variety of images including venetian blinds, musical scales and Chinese Style Landscapes.

The Walt Disney Company publishes Virtual Interior: Portrait of a Duck to benefit several children’s charities. It is his first collaboration with the printing house Noblet Serigraphie, Inc., New York.

Continues to create Interiors, some of which he refers to as "virtual paintings," which feature colored, instead of black-only, outlining.

March 31, 1995

New York Times publishes "Disciple of Color and Line, Master of Irony," an interview conducted by chief staff art critic Michael Kimmelman on the artist’s favorite pieces at the museum.

June 8, 1995

Donates Composition III, based on the motif of musical notes, to the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies; 175 copies of the print hang in US embassies.

October 1995

Selected by Capuchin monks to design and execute two murals for Chapel of the Eucharist, the Padre Pio Pilgrimage located in San Giovanni Rotondo in Apulia, which is to be designed by Renzo Piano. The site centers on the tomb of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin friar, priest and mystic, and is the second most-visited Roman Catholic shrine in the world.

October 5, 1995

Receives the National Medal of Arts at a gala ceremony in Washington, D.C., presented by President and Mrs. Clinton.

November 1995

Brushstroke Still Life with Lamp print on honey-comb core aluminum is started at Saff Tech. It, along with three others, features hand-painted brushstrokes; only one of the four prints is completed by the artist before his death.

November 10, 1995

Receives Kyoto Prize from Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan. Travels to Kyoto to accept the award and deliver a lecture on his work.

Inspired by monotype and pastel landscapes of Edgar Degas at the Met in 1994, begins a large series of Song Dynasty–inspired mountain views that he refers to as Landscapes in the Chinese Style. First makes a series of sketches and creates collages using shapes cut from sheets of printed Benday dot paper in graduated sizes to create monochromatic tonalities that simulate atmospheric effects.

Creates self-portrait, entitled Coup de Chapeau (Self-Portrait).

1996

May 1996

Creates a foam core model and a collage for a hologram of a domestic interior commissioned by the C-Project based in Miami Beach. Unhappy with the results, abandons the idea. Concurrently begins work on maquettes of sculptures of a Pyramid and several Houses that rely on inverted angles to create the illusion of three-dimensionality.

May 19, 1996

Awarded honorary doctorate in fine arts from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

August 1996

Designs logo for DreamWorks Records, a subsidiary of the film company DreamWorks SKG, founded by David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

September 28–October 26, 1996

Roy Lichtenstein: Landscapes in the Chinese Style is presented at Leo Castelli.

December 1996

Donates 154 of his prints and two books spanning his career to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., making it the largest repository of his prints.

Embarks on a series of sculptures based on brushstrokes and drips.

Sculptures of houses play with the idea of perspective similar in feel to diagrams in Sherman’s book Drawing by Seeing.

Creates a collage and two drawings called Mickasso, which play on the Disney character Mickey Mouse and Picasso’s Cubist style.

Approached by NARAL to design a pro-choice button, creates a design featuring a hanger within a red circle with a diagonal line through it. The design is never produced.

1997

No longer able to find Bocour Magna paints, begins using Mineral Spirit Acrylics (MSA) by Golden Artist Colors, Inc. instead, which perform similarly.

Completes over one hundred drawing and collage studies and a number of paintings of various virtual-style Interiors that feature tableaux of tables and chairs combined with female figures, still lifes and other classical references.

Works on a number of prints, including one for Leo Castelli’s 90th Birthday Portfolio along with Cubist Cello, which features references to Marc Chagall, in support of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Center for Contemporary Art at the Tel Aviv Museum.

Sketchbooks evidence drawings after Cézanne’s Bather series.

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495–98; Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy) makes several colored-pencil drawings in sketchbooks for the murals at the Chapel of the Eucharist commission, but they are never realized.

April 9, 1997

Dedication of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Center for Contemporary Art by the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel.

April 30, 1997

Interviewed by David Sylvester. The interview is one of the last given by the artist.

June 1997

Travels to the Saff and Company workshop to add the hand-painted strokes of Brushstroke Still Life with Lamp. This is the only one of the three prints that is completed by the artist before his death.

Last major outdoor sculpture, comprising six large pieces, Singapore Brushstroke, is installed at the Pontiac Marina in Singapore.

June 15–November 9, 1997

The 47th Venice Biennale opens. House II, a composite construction with fiberglass of a house exterior, is shown at the Italian Pavilion in the exhibition Future, Present, and Past, curated by Biennale commissioner Germano Celant.

September 5–October 7, 1997

Galerie Lawrence Rubin in Zurich presents an exhibition of new Interior paintings. Sylvester’s interview is published in the catalogue.

September 29, 1997

Dies unexpectedly at New York University Medical Center in Manhattan from complications due to pneumonia.

_{Text by Clare Bell and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation}