The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was 16 years old when he studied with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League. “I did sort of appalling paintings,” Lichtenstein admitted. “A kind of Reginald Marsh realism.” When he died at the age of 73 in 1997, he was still a representational artist—and he was world famous. Lichtenstein combined elements from both fine and commercial arts. Astoundingly versatile, he could make a drawing the size of a postage stamp or paint a mural several stories high. Initially appropriating subjects from such sources as comic strips and advertising, he later introduced traditional themes, including landscape, nudes, and still-life. His hallmark benday dots, borrowed from commercial printing, gave way to diagonal lines and hatching. He often used black and white and a palette of red, yellow, blue, and green. “I start with drawings or collages,” Lichtenstein once explained, “and usually I can see how it will work out in the painting. I often collage changes on the painting itself. . . . I stop working on a painting when everything satisfies me .” In 1967, Lichtenstein started to summer in Southampton. After 1970, he resided full-time for a number of years on a compound by the water. Eventually, he lived and worked in both New York City and the East End.
[Phyllis Tuchman]