Becoming Roy Lichtenstein

A landmark artist biography that takes us behind the Ben-Day dots and into the invention of Pop.

When Roy Lichtenstein painted his breakthrough canvas Look Mickey in 1961—an image of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse adapted from a storybook belonging to his young sons—he was an obscure thirty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Rutgers who had laboured for years on the periphery of the art world. Within a few years, Pop paintings like this one, in which he transformed the crude imagery and graphic techniques of the funny pages into carefully ordered compositions, would make Lichtenstein rich and famous like few artists before. His art, instantly recognisable yet cool and impersonal, had the curious effect of obscuring its own history and the man behind it. But who was Roy Lichtenstein? And how had he, at the moment of painting Look Mickey, finally been able to transcend the boundaries of his own good taste and elevate comics to high art?
Now, for the first time, the story of Lichtenstein’s life up through his annus mirabilis is told in full. Author Avis Berman, drawing on hundreds of interviews with the artist’s friends, relatives, students, and colleagues, as well as extensive archival research, takes us from his childhood on the Upper West Side to his education at Ohio State, where a charismatic mentor teaches him “how to see”; his tumultuous first marriage and peripatetic teaching career; his struggle to find his own style and escape the shadow of Abstract Expressionism; and finally the fateful summer of 1961. It is an unexpectedly moving story, one that brings Lichtenstein to life as an American master to stand beside a Warhol, a Pollock, a de Kooning, an O’Keeffe. Illustrated in full colour throughout.