Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960

This catalogue reconstructs the decade before Roy Lichtenstein's breakthrough into Pop Art, covering paintings, drawings, and prints made between 1948 and 1960. In these years he worked through Cubism, American folk art, and Abstract Expressionism before arriving at the Ben-Day dot style that made him famous.

Edited by curators Elizabeth Finch and Marshall N. Price, the 223-page volume gathers essays by Finch, Price, Graham Bader, Ruth Fine, and Scott Manning Stevens. It reproduces paintings from the period, many rarely exhibited. The book follows Lichtenstein from his student years at Ohio State University through a series of stylistic experiments: cowboys, Native American imagery, and Americana drawn from folk sources. Art history had largely treated this work as a footnote to his mature paintings.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997) became one of the defining figures of American Pop Art after 1961, when he began painting comic-strip panels and advertising imagery in flat color and mechanical dot patterns. This earlier body of work, largely unseen for decades, shows the visual vocabulary he was testing before that turn.