Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961–1968

Between 1961 and 1968, at the height of the Pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) created about fifty large, highly finished, black-and-white drawings, which represent an essential contribution to the history of modern drawing. Not only was their imagery, culled from consumer culture, en... Read more

Between 1961 and 1968, at the height of the Pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) created about fifty large, highly finished, black-and-white drawings, which represent an essential contribution to the history of modern drawing. Not only was their imagery, culled from consumer culture, entirely new – baked potatoes, ads for foot medication and BB Guns—but so was their treatment, inspired by the rudimentary character of cheaply printed commercial drawings. Conceived independently from Lichtenstein’s paintings, these drawings recast tawdry illustrations from packaging, newspaper ads and comic books into works of striking visual intensity, echoing the clean-edge aesthetic of sixties geometric abstraction.