Roy LICHTENSTEIN   Born in New York in 1923, Roy Lichtenstein majored in art at Ohio State University. After graduating, he stayed in Ohio teaching and working as an industrial designer, a job requiring an exactness which, years later, influenced his art. Returning to New York in 1957 Lichtenstein met such artists as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and George Segal, and he became a regular fixture in the happenings of the art world. In 1960 Lichtenstein rebelled against "High Art" taboos and began to take his inspiration from cartoons and advertisements he found in the telephone book. He chose emotionally charged subjects, such as romantic heroines and heroes, and rendered them in "Pop" style. From hot dogs to haystacks, Mickey Mouse to Mondrian, the artist made monumental pictures out of unexpected visual clichés. His work was a dramatic departure from the accepted fine arts standards and values of the times. Lichtenstein's art does not comment on the culture at large. His subject was style, not comics or consumerism or the media. He made paintings out of the language of print - out of bold outlines and Benday dots, and almost all of his prints were printed as offset lithographs after his paintings of the 1960s. Lichtenstein's work is part of collections worldwide including Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum Moderne Kunst, Vienna, Austria; Nagoya Museum, Nagoya, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.
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