Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960

Elizabeth Finch and Marshall N. Price, with Graham Bader, Ruth Fine, and Scott Manning Stevens

Hardcover, 8.25 x 11.5 in., 224 pp.

Co-published with Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Rizzoli Electa

$55

Corresponding Exhibition: Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960 is the first major museum exhibition to investigate the early work of one of the best known American artists of the twentieth century. Co-organized by Colby College Museum of Art and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the exhibition includes approximately ninety works from the artist’s fruitful and formative early career, many never before seen by the public. The show and accompanying catalogue feature paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, which reveal an artist, even in the earliest stages of his career, with a keen interest in visual culture, culling from a wide range of sources. These inspirations were the essential but little-known precursors to the artist’s later sourcing of comic books and advertisements. Likewise, his exploration of abstraction, just before the artist’s abrupt turn to Pop Art in 1961, straddles the line between unabashed lyricism and wry critique of second-generation Abstract Expressionism.

The award-winning catalogue, with scholarship by leading experts in the field, provides a new understanding of Lichtenstein’s influential techniques of appropriation and offers the opportunity to more fully assess the artistic and cultural dynamism of postwar America.