Lichtenstein: Comic as art

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the 20th century. Today, October 27, he would have turned 100 years old. In the early 1960s, he helped shape the Pop Art movement, which was particularly profound in the United States: His pictures with comic aesthetics made a decisive contribution to the blurring of the boundaries between art, commerce and everyday objects. His breakthrough as an artist came in 1961 with Look Mickey. Lichtenstein worked largely in his native New York, where he had his first major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1969. In the 1970s he experimented with other art styles such as Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and again Expressionism, to which he had belonged as a student in the 1950s. Lichtenstein also made public sculptures that can be seen today in places such as Miami Beach, Paris, Barcelona and Singapore.

Lichtenstein died in 1997 at the age of 73. His influence on the art world is unbroken; he is one of the most sought-after artists on the auction market. There, Nurse (1964) achieved a record price for the artist in 2015 with more than $95 million. His most expensive painting ever is Masterpiece (1962), which changed hands for $165 million in 2017. However, this was a private purchase, which is why this is not recorded in our databases.