"Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.", Roy Lichtenstein, 1963
Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American Pop artist and one of the central figures of the postwar American art world, often described as the "father of Pop Art." Born in New York City, he studied briefly with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League and earned his BFA and MFA at Ohio State University, where he taught for several years before moving to a series of teaching positions on the East Coast. In 1960 he joined the faculty at Rutgers University, where his contact with Allan Kaprow and the broader downtown New York avant-garde shaped his decisive move toward Pop Art the following year.
His 1961 painting Look Mickey, produced, according to family lore, after one of his sons challenged him to paint as well as a Mickey Mouse comic book, introduced the comic-strip-derived imagery, hard outlines, primary colors, and hand-painted Ben-Day dots that would define his career. Whaam! (1963), Drowning Girl (1963), and the long sequence of paintings that followed established him as one of the leading American Pop artists alongside Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1995. His work is held in essentially every major collection of postwar art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern (which holds Whaam!), the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art (which holds Look Mickey, bequeathed to the museum at his death).