Roy Lichtenstein
Painted comic panels by hand, Ben-Day dots and all, and made them enormous.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923, taught for years at Rutgers and elsewhere, and in 1961 painted Look Mickey, reportedly after his son pointed at a comic and said he could not draw as well as that. What followed were the war and romance paintings — a single enlarged comic panel, its printing dots hand-painted through a stencil, its speech balloon intact — which were attacked on publication as plagiarism and are now among the most recognisable images of the century. He went on to reprocess Monet, Picasso, Mondrian and Art Deco in the same manner, and made sculpture and murals until his death in 1997.
Lichtenstein was a major printmaker and the editions, published principally by Gemini G.E.L., Leo Castelli and Tyler Graphics, are the bulk of what most sellers hold; Corlett's catalogue raisonne of the prints is the necessary reference and identifies edition, publisher and state. The flat unmodulated colour and the printed dots make fading and any surface intervention immediately visible. Posters, exhibition announcements and unauthorised reproductions circulate in enormous numbers and are routinely offered as prints. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation holds the archive.
If you own a work by Roy Lichtenstein
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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