Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of women occupy a defining place within the emergence of American Pop art. Beginning in 1961, he isolated female figures from newspaper advertisements and romance comics, enlarging their stylized faces, abbreviated emotions, and melodramatic situations into meticulously constructed paintings. Ben-Day dots, flat primary colors, black contours, and cropped compositions transformed ephemeral commercial images into works of striking formal concentration. Far from merely reproducing comic-book imagery, Lichtenstein examined how mass media codified beauty, desire, vulnerability, and emotional expression, maintaining a calculated distance from his subjects while exposing the visual conventions through which femininity was represented.

Published by Gagosian for the 2008 exhibition Lichtenstein Girls in New York, the catalogue brings together color plates and details of fifteen paintings and two ceramic sculptures, together with preparatory studies and the printed sources from which the works developed. A conversation between Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons considers the works from both personal and artistic perspectives, while Richard Hamilton contributes a tribute and Richard Prince responds with an inserted artist’s book. A selected chronology situates the group within Lichtenstein’s career. Designed by Graphic Thought Facility, the large-format hardcover is both a focused study of one of the artist’s most recognizable subjects and an important record of the processes of selection, enlargement, simplification, and transformation underlying his practice.