Whitney Retrospective Reframes Roy Lichtenstein as the Original Master Appropriator

The Whitney Museum’s long-awaited retrospective “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” makes a persuasive case that the Pop artist was the original master appropriator, deliberately feeding into a pictures-obsessed moment he saw coming. Organized by Whitney curator Meg Onli and artist Alex Da Corte, the show, on view through May 10, returns a certain sangfroid to Lichtenstein’s work. It suggests that his gleeful forays into art history and his cheery reds and yellows were less about transformation than about a kind of mean-spirited aesthetic thievery.

A Copy, or Something More?

That argument is set up at the entrance. Visitors walk the length of a gargantuan remake of a 1983 mural cannibalizing Lichtenstein’s signature motifs—brushstrokes, benday dots—before arriving at Image Duplicator (1963), a painting of two bulging eyes with raised brows. The image, based on a comic panel, is paired with a speech bubble in comic font: “What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” Neither the picture nor the text is faithfully appropriated, but the message is clear: think of Lichtenstein as the curators’ own image duplicator.

“Copies are not transformations, except when they are.”

The show does not radically upend one’s understanding of Lichtenstein—this is the third US retrospective in 35 years—but it does return some detachment to the work. A reconstruction of Lichtenstein’s 1963 Leo Castelli Gallery debut, housed in a walk-in room so faithful that even the gallery’s parquet floor has been rebuilt, anchors the exhibition. Alongside Lichtenstein’s originals, Da Corte and Onli feature appropriations of Lichtenstein by Richard Pettibone, Sturtevant, and Louise Lawler, making the duplication meta.

From Ohio State to Pop

The curators provide their image duplicator with an origin story, picking up in the 1940s with Lichtenstein’s time as a graduate student at Ohio State University. There, in Hoyt L. Sherman’s Visual Demonstration Center, students learned in the dark as they were shown a succession of images meant to test perception—an experience Da Corte imagines in a video made for the exhibition. Lichtenstein ultimately went Pop rather than Op, and by the ’60s he was directing mind-bending aesthetic strategies toward a visual language recalling advertising. Golf Ball (1961) winks at Piet Mondrian’s Composition 10 in Black and White (1915), then defiles the Dutch modernist’s purity—a gesture akin to a middle finger to abstraction at a time when critics prized it above all.

Lichtenstein also turned to artists who had themselves experimented with seriality, including Claude Monet, whose Rouen Cathedral paintings he remade with benday dots. One take features the cathedral buried beneath a matrix of black dots on a deep blue background, possibly alluding to Ad Reinhardt’s blue-on-blue abstractions. The Whitney reaches its apex around the Rouen Cathedral works and never quite again reaches those heights. A gallery of “Mirror” paintings from the ’70s and a range of works depicting artists’ studios in modes recalling Matisse and Picasso lack the barbs of the ’60s work, whose appropriations are more direct and therefore more striking. A few landscapes, including 1996’s Treetops Through the Fog, take cues from both comics and Chinese shanshui painting, but do not thrill in the same way.

The Monumental Copy Outside

One of the show’s finest copies is outdoors. On the Whitney’s facade, a 32-foot-tall version of Lichtenstein’s mural for the 1963 New York World’s Fair—a large version of Girl in Window—was painted by Da Corte and his studio assistants. It doubles as both a loving homage and a means of raising a great work to new heights. The source painting is one of many Lichtensteins held by the Whitney, which also owns the artist’s studio and now uses it as the home of its Independent Study Program. To quote Erle Loran once more: “A copy of anything, even when blown up to the monumental size of a billboard, is still a copy.” Fair enough, as this work demonstrates, but is that really such a bad thing?