Roy Lichtenstein Commemorations Continue

I don’t have big anxieties. I wish I did. I’d be much more interesting.
– Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

 

Dorothy Lichtenstein established the Lichtenstein Foundation in 1999, with a mission to facilitate public access to her husband’s works. Before her death, in 2024, the Foundation had donated his works to museums around the world, gave The Whitney the couple’s building in New York and created a catalogue raisonné of Roy Lichtenstein’s work with free public access.

 

Dorothy died in 2024, and the role of Foundation President was filled by Mitchell Wilson Lichtenstein, Roy Lichtenstein’s younger son, a graduate of Bennington College and the Yale School of Drama.

 

 

More than forty of Lichtenstein’s works, from the family’s private collection, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s this month. Most of Lichtenstein’s works, that were part of a Sotheby’s auction last November, sold above estimate, to collectors from North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

 

In an interview with ARTnews, Sotheby’s Vice Chairman and Head of Contemporary Art, David Galperin, said, “Lichtenstein has become an artist whose work really carries universal renown and appeal, like Picasso, like Warhol, like Alexander Calder, artists who are perhaps the most stable of the art market.”

 

In the last two years, the Lichtenstein Foundation has donated more than 250 works by the artist to major venues like the British Museum, the Albertina, the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio State University, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the National Gallery Australia. 

 

A retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein’s work is being planned at the Whitney for Fall 2026 and another at the British Museum for 2027.

 

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In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception…to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best…better than say, painting or collaging or watercolor or drawing or whatever…Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphic that he does in his other work.

– Robert Motherwell

 

An exhibit of Robert Motherwell’s (1915-1991) prints are on view at the New York Public Library. The prints are on display alongside selected books from Motherwell’s personal library of nearly 4,000 books. 

 

 

Motherwell was not just an artist, but also an accomplished writer, editor, speaker and  philosopher with a PhD from Harvard.

 

Robert Motherwell: At Home and in the Studio will be on view at the New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building through August 2, 2025.

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Motherwell available at Surovek Gallery.

 

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May 2, 2025