Whitney Opens First Lichtenstein Retrospective Since 1993

For the first time in more than three decades, New York has a major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, and it opened this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” gathers 130 works made between the 1940s and 1990s, tracing the Pop artist’s long preoccupation with images and the way they are seen, copied and passed along. The show opened October 11 and runs through May 10, 2027.

The exhibition does not stay indoors. A recreated 32-foot-tall version of “Girl in Window” is visible from the High Line, and a towering “Coups de Pinceau” sculpture stands on the museum’s fifth-floor terrace. Inside, the checklist includes some of Lichtenstein’s best-known pictures: “Look Mickey,” “Girl with Ball,” “Masterpiece,” “Drowning Girl,” “Happy Tears” and “Little Big Painting.”

The show is curated by Meg Onli and Alex Da Corte. Da Corte, an artist himself, contributed new works of his own and recreated several Lichtenstein pieces, among them “Super Sunset Billboard” and “Girl in Window.” Colossal Media recreated “Greene Street Mural,” which measures 96 feet long. The Whitney also built a full-scale architectural facsimile of the Leo Castelli Gallery space, allowing visitors to see Lichtenstein’s first show there, from 1962, assembled as it originally was.

The title comes from a 1962 work. Lichtenstein pulled his imagery from comic books and advertisements, then reworked it using what the museum describes as “bold black outlines, flat bright colors, and fields of dots associated with commercial printing.” That approach, the Whitney says, upended “conventional notions of what artwork could be.”

The museum is explicit about why it thinks the work lands differently now. “In an era when pictures are endlessly generated, copied, altered, filtered, and reposted across screens, Lichtenstein’s art is strikingly prescient and remarkably relevant,” the Whitney says. It adds that Lichtenstein “understood long before the digital age that images are never stable: they move through the world and return transformed. With each iteration, they are made ‘like new.'” In a moment of computer-generated pictures, the exhibition also stresses the handmade quality of his paintings and prints.

The show builds on a longer relationship between the artist’s estate and the museum. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation donated 400 works to the Whitney in 2018. In 2022, Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, gave the museum his former studio building at 741/745 Washington Street, with the intention that it host the Whitney’s Independent Study Program.

With the run stretching into next spring, the exhibition offers a long window to see Lichtenstein’s work in the city where he made much of it. More information is available on the Whitney’s website.