Katonah , NY -  Lichtenstein in Process , featuring 65 works by one of America’s preeminent 20^th century artists, opens on March 29th at the Katonah Museum of Art. Offering a rare glimpse of the pop artist’s creative process, the exhibition focuses on sequences of serial preliminary sketches, drawings, and collages, dating the 1970s to the 1990s.  Originally organized by the Fundación Juan March (in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation) and shown at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca, and the Museo d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma, the exhibition has its US debut at the KMA, March 29th through June 28th , and then travels to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis.

More rapid in execution, smaller in format, more intimate in nature, Lichtenstein’s sketches and drawings are shown alongside his  collages, the last step before the finished paintings or sculptures.  Curator Jack Cowart, Executive Director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, writes:

“I think the artist’s personal sourcebooks, clippings, sketchbooks, and many, many extant drawings and collages offer some of the best clues to his thoughts and process, plus his hand, touch and eye.  In these works he is planning and scheming, musing on composition and source....here we do see the selective, editorial artist at work, effecting his trademark transformation of a known or given form or even a form he has thought up freehand into something uniquely his own, while pushing at the boundaries or capabilities of art media.”

Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City. In 1939 he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an M.F.A. in 1949. In 1951 the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract paintings of the Old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family.

Beginning in the 1960s, Lichtenstein was inspired by the themes and images of mass culture, advertising, and the comic strip. “Lichtenstein’s art is simultaneously a critique and an incessantly curious homage, further infused with autobiographical content and intention,” says Cowart. “All this eventually subverts our thinking into his terms more than our own.”

The exhibition catalogue includes commentary by art historian Avis Berman, with excerpts from interviews with Lichtenstein and several of his studio assistants, offering further insight to the artist’s work, style, and humor:

"In the beginning I didn’t even keep drawings. They just fell on the floor and were swept up…. They went out with the trash … because they show a kind of give-and-take and change – adjustments – that disappear.  My style is not one of having give-and-take, it just comes out miraculously.  It’s just the style, but it isn’t the way it happens. I collage these paintings over and over again, so I’m really working with it in the same way you would with an expressionist work, but I don’t want traces of all that activity going on."   – Lichtenstein

Known for working on multiple projects at once, Lichtenstein’s assistants confer on his hard-working ethic, one that equaled his sheer love of painting. “ All Roy wanted to do was paint,” shares Richard Dimmler.  “That’s it. He got up, we had to have lunch during the day, but otherwise he went back and painted until [his wife] Dorothy told him he had to stop and do something social for the evening.”

The sketches and drawings present the creative genesis in the pure and personal hand and spirit of the artist.  According to its curator, one half of the exhibition’s works are “inside” depictions, suggesting an interior or a studio.  The other works set figures and things “outside,” in fictive landscape.   The exhibition includes one sequence with a finished painting, Interior with Nude Leaving, allowing viewers to see the completed process, which Cowart describes as one the grand finales a completed painting in its almost unimaginable and colorful large scale and high, technically brilliant finish.

On an average studio workday, Dimmler says: “Roy would start by doing a drawing. Everything from Roy came from the sketch in the morning he made at his drafting table or the cartoon he might do at night. I know he and Dorothy would watch TV, and he had sketch pads and he would churn out … ideas. Then he would put them up and turn it into a drawing. Every painting started off with a cartoon, every sculpture started off with a cartoon, and got revised, enlarged, and continued down the process.”

Major funding for Lichtenstein in Process was provided by Mary Lou and Spike Beitzel.  Additional funding was provided by the Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the Museum’s Exhibition Patrons. The Katonah Museum of Art, through innovative exhibition and education programs, promotes the understanding and enjoyment of the arts for visitors of all ages. The Museum presents diverse exhibitions that explore ideas about art, culture and society.

The Katonah Museum of Art is located at 134 Jay Street in Katonah, NY. / 914-232-9555.  www.katonahmuseum.org