An artist curates Lichtenstein

The Whitney Museum tapped filmmaker Alex Da Corte to curate a major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work. It's the first time in the museum's nearly 100-year history an artist has led a major retrospective.

Lichtenstein's staggering influence

Born in Manhattan, Lichtenstein turned comic book imagery into iconic paintings that sold out his 1962 debut before opening. MoMA holds 155 of his works, and in 2017 Steve Cohen paid $165 million for Masterpiece.

The dot became visual shorthand

By 2023, when five Lichtenstein works appeared on US postage stamps, his dot pattern had become synonymous with Pop art itself. The close cropping of images on Instagram is pure Lichtenstein.

Fresh eyes on a legend

Da Corte and co-curator Meg Onli, who came from The Underground Museum in LA, weren't Lichtenstein scholars. They realized their distance from the artist wasn't a hurdle but a superpower.

The show is called Like New

The curators took the title from a Lichtenstein work that appropriates an advertisement for a screen door repair service, where dots become a texture-like pattern rather than comic book imagery.

Approaching him as a person

Da Corte and Onli wanted to reposition Lichtenstein not as a distant figure but as a person in a world. The show opens through May 2027 and will be one of the most conceptually daring in New York this fall.

“We're trying to approach [Lichtenstein] as a person, not approach him as this distant figure but a person who was in a world.”

The dot is everywhere now

Da Corte noticed dots on a box of sweet potatoes in his kitchen, styled to reference Lichtenstein. The curators' job is to cite where these visual decisions come from and show Lichtenstein's influence on culture.

A 32-foot mural on the museum

The Whitney will install a giant 32-by-25-foot Lichtenstein-by-Da Corte recreation on the side of the museum overlooking the Meatpacking District. Visitors can touch the dots on panels in Da Corte's Philadelphia studio first.

Leaning into appropriation

Instead of avoiding how Lichtenstein appropriated comic book imagery, the curators feature original comic books and works by appropriation artists like Louise Lawler and Richard Prince alongside his paintings.

Lichtenstein and the Pictures Generation

Da Corte argues Lichtenstein should be thought of alongside appropriation artists like Richard Prince and Sarah Charlesworth who interrogate where images come from. They share a kinship in questioning visual sources.

Artists appropriating Lichtenstein

Sturtevant, Richard Pettibone, and Louise Lawler remade Lichtenstein's works as their own. Lichtenstein got the joke and even signed Pettibone's works and gave Sturtevant materials to make exact copies of his paintings.

Da Corte makes a video for the show

After initially refusing, Da Corte created a film where he plays Hoyt Sherman, Lichtenstein's college art professor at Ohio State who used psychedelic teaching methods involving afterimages and drawing in the dark.

The Greene Street Mural returns

A nearly 100-foot recreation of Lichtenstein's masterpiece that hung at Leo Castelli's gallery in SoHo from December 1983 to January 1984 will be installed on the Whitney's exterior as a temporary Instagram moment.

Instagram is a scroll, like art

Da Corte sees the Greene Street Mural living on in the cloud through photos. He compared a Castelli dust jacket flipped vertically and dragged upward to an Instagram feed, both are scrolls of images.

“This is not dissimilar to a feed. It's a scroll.”

Lichtenstein predicted our moment

The curators believe Lichtenstein would approve of bringing his work to now. We understand our lives through pictures and images in a stream, exactly as Lichtenstein showed us how to see.

“To bring Roy to the moment is to look at this wall, to look at this painting, to say, 'Of course it's urgent. This is exactly how we understand our lives now: through pictures, through images, through all of this.'”