Roy Lichtenstein's First New York Retrospective Since 1993 Opens at the Whitney
In February 1962, Roy Lichtenstein showed his first Pop paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Sixty-four years later, the eight paintings seen in installation photographs of that show hang together again for the first time, in a gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art that reconstructs the original gallery setting. The room anchors Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, on view October 11, 2026 to May 10, 2027 on Floor 5 at 99 Gansevoort Street. It is the first New York retrospective of the artist since 1993.
The show takes its title from Like New, a 1962 graphite drawing from a private collection that is in the exhibition. It brings together roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s, across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and film.
The Castelli room
The Castelli show ran February 10 to March 3, 1962. Its paintings drew on romance and war comics, advertisements and product packaging, and they established the visual language that came to define his work: flattened forms, bold outlines, primary colors and uniform dot patterns. The re-created gallery includes The Kiss, The Engagement Ring, Washing Machine, Turkey and Laughing Cat, all from 1961, alongside Blam, The Refrigerator and The Grip from 1962.
Duplication as the subject
The Whitney frames the whole career around copying. Lichtenstein took images from comics, newspapers, advertising and commercial printing, cropped and adjusted them, enlarged them with a projector, transferred them to canvas, and then painted by hand to imitate the outlines, flat color and dots of a printing press. Lichtenstein himself said reproduction was the real subject of his work, and the show takes him at his word.
The method later turned inward. In the Artist's Studio paintings, inspired in part by Matisse's The Red Studio (1911), he lifted motifs from his own earlier canvases and rearranged them into invented interiors.
Other works on view include Look Mickey (1961), Girl with Ball (1961), Masterpiece (1962), Drowning Girl (1963), Happy Tears (1964), Little Big Painting (1965), Rouen Cathedral, Set III (1968 to 69) and Artist's Studio "The Dance" (1974). His only film, Three Landscapes (1970 to 71), made for LACMA's Art and Technology program during a residency at Universal Film Studios, is also included.
Murals made again
Several large works have been rebuilt for the show. The Greene Street Mural, 18 feet by 95 feet 8 inches, was first painted in 1983 on the back wall of Castelli's SoHo gallery and was meant to be temporary. Colossal Media has hand painted it again, the fourth time it has been presented. Colossal Media also re-created a wall of the University of Düsseldorf Brushstroke Mural (1970) as the backdrop for the 1960s brushstroke paintings.
Outside, Alex Da Corte Studio has re-created the New York World's Fair Mural (Girl in Window) (1963), 32 by 25 1/2 feet, on the fifth floor terrace, where it is visible from the High Line. The studio has also re-created the Super Sunset Billboard (1967) in the museum's west-facing window, and the 30-foot brushstroke sculpture Coups de Pinceau (1988, fabricated 2011) stands on the same terrace.
Work by Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant is shown alongside. Pettibone and Sturtevant both appropriated Lichtenstein's pictures in the mid-1960s.
The exhibition is organized by Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator, with Nakai Falcón and David Crane. Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923, lived mostly in New York and Southampton, and died in 1997 at seventy-three.
Visiting
- Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday 10:30 am to 6 pm; Friday 10:30 am to 10 pm; closed Tuesday.
- Admission: adults $30; seniors and students $24; free for visitors 25 and under and for members.
- Free Friday Nights run 5 to 10 pm, and the second Sunday of each month is free.
- Advance tickets are recommended, online at whitney.org or at the museum.
