The ALBERTINA Museum is celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Roy Lichtenstein, one of the most influential pioneers of 20th-century art and one of pop art’s most important protagonists, with a major retrospective. Works of central significance from European and American museums such as New York’s MoMA and Whitney Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum Ludwig, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Moderna Museet, and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza as well as from international private collections have been selected in order to introduce the most important phases of this artist’s multifarious oeuvre from the early 1960s to his late works. This selection includes famous icons of 1960s pop art such as the stereotypical blondes and clichéd military heroes ironically portrayed by Lichtenstein in his appropriations of Mickey Mouse, romantic, and war-themed comics as well as famous advertising motifs with an eye to addressing both the postwar consumer products industry’s constructions of femininity and masculinity and the initial protests of the American women’s, anti-Vietnam War, and anti-nuclear movements. Likewise represented will be Lichtenstein’s creations after artworks by figures ranging from Picasso to Monet and on to the Surrealists, his re-stagings of still lifes, and his futuristic-seeming wall paintings, enamel works, and Rowlux paintings—as will his self-referential mirror series, his interiors and landscapes, and the Brushstrokes constructed from Ben Day dots with which he rejected the subjectivity of the abstract expressionists.

Lichtenstein’s paintings almost always refer to preexisting images and hence present a second-degree reality, thereby drawing equally on “high” and “low” art. In this light, attention will also be given to his cartoon aesthetics and imitations of industrial printing techniques as well as to his hitherto less-known sculptural oeuvre, about all of which Lichtenstein himself said: “I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.”

This exhibition has been organized with the assistance and cooperation of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and Estate.