Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective
Assembled for the first full retrospective since Lichtenstein's death, this catalogue runs the work from 1950 to 1997 and gives as much attention to the abstractions, the landscapes in the Chinese style and the late nudes as to the war and romance panels.
The exhibition, organised by James Rondeau for the Art Institute of Chicago and Sheena Wagstaff for Tate Modern, brought together more than 130 paintings and sculptures with some thirty drawings and collages, many of them rarely or never shown, and travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou across 2012 and 2013. Nine essays follow the editors' introduction, among them Harry Cooper's 'On the Dot', Iria Candela's 'Picasso in Two Acts' and Sara Doris's 'Missing Modernism', with further texts by Yve-Alain Bois, Chrissie Iles, James Lawrence and Stephen Little. Clare Bell of the Lichtenstein Foundation supplies a full chronology. 368 pages, 172 colour plates and a further 99 figures in the essays.
Lichtenstein (1923-1997) worked for close to fifty years, and the retrospective's argument is that the sources never stopped shifting: comics and advertising first, then Monet, Cubism, Futurism, German Expressionism, Chinese scroll painting and finally his own back catalogue.
