Roy Lichtenstein Works on Paper: a Retrospective

November 20 - January 19, 2007

Monday, November 20, 5:30-7:03 pm

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein Works on Paper: a Retrospective will be on view at the James Goodman Gallery in New York from November 20 to January 15, 2007. The exhibition will feature 38 drawings and 5 collages, spanning four decades of the pre-eminent Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s career from 1961 to 1996. This show will include many seldom-seen works from private collections.

The exhibition will be comprised of both color pencil studies for paintings and sculpture and independently conceived graphite drawings. Highlights from the latter group will be three rare, large scale graphite works from the sixties: “Keds” 1961, “Ice Cream Cone” 1963, and “Shockproof” 1963. The exhibition will also include a group of collages which serve as studies for prints, tapestries and sculpture.

Throughout his career, Lichtenstein used drawing as his departure point. As a young art student, he was trained in classical drawing at Ohio State University. The artist used his drawings as a space for the careful working out of ideas for his paintings and sculptures. In drawing, Lichtenstein felt free to modify and to experiment. The drawings are the artist’s most intimate statements and his private records. Lichtenstein stated that drawing was critical to his artistic process in a 1984 interview with Robert Pincus-Witten:

“Drawing is the basis of my art. It is where my thinking takes place. It is a big part of my painting. The paintings are always the same, only larger. But they may not get at all better. I am not thinking it up while I am actually doing the painting. A certain spontaneity is lost. Drawing has more interesting traces…”

In 1984, the James Goodman Gallery held the first exhibition of Lichtenstein works on paper in the United States. Many of the works in the present exhibition have not been on public view since that time.

The exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to view 24 works from the collection of James and Katherine Goodman. The Goodmans began collecting these drawings in the early sixties and continued to do so well into the nineties, while cultivating a close personal relationship with Roy Lichtenstein and his wife Dorothy. As a result the collection offers a comprehensive look at the artist’s themes and development.