A landmark artist biography that takes us behind the Ben-Day dots and into the invention of Pop

When Roy Lichtenstein painted his breakthrough canvas Look Mickey in 1961—an image of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse adapted from a storybook belonging to his young sons—he was an obscure thirty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Rutgers who had labored for years on the periphery of the art world. Within a few years, Pop paintings like this one, in which he transformed the crude imagery and graphic techniques of the funny pages into carefully ordered compositions, would make Lichtenstein rich and famous like few artists before. His art, instantly recognizable yet cool and impersonal, had the curious effect of obscuring its own history and the man behind it. But who was Roy Lichtenstein? And how had he, at the moment of painting Look Mickey, finally been able to transcend the boundaries of his own good taste and elevate comics to high art?

Now, for the first time, the story of Lichtenstein’s life up through his annus mirabilis is told in full. Author Avis Berman, drawing on hundreds of interviews with the artist’s friends, relatives, students, and colleagues, as well as extensive archival research, takes us from his childhood on the Upper West Side to his education at Ohio State, where a charismatic mentor teaches him “how to see”; his tumultuous first marriage and peripatetic teaching career; his struggle to find his own style and escape the shadow of Abstract Expressionism; and finally the fateful summer of 1961. It is an unexpectedly moving story, one that brings Lichtenstein to life as an American master to stand beside a Warhol, a Pollock, a de Kooning, an O’Keeffe.

Avis Berman has written extensively on art for publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Her books include Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art; Edward Hopper’s New York; and Roy Lichtenstein: The Impossible Collection. She is also an oral historian of art, having interviewed more than five hundred artists, curators, critics, dealers, collectors, and other art world figures for such organizations as the Archives of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. The oral histories she compiled for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, starting in 2001, were the genesis of this book.

Justin Brancato is Deputy Director and Director of Archives at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, where he has worked to steward Lichtenstein’s legacy since 2010. As Deputy Director, he has helped guide the Foundation’s long-range planning, including its sunset. As Director of Archives, he has overseen the archive and its digitization, reference services for scholars and institutions, rights and permissions, research for the Roy Lichtenstein catalogue raisonné, and the transfer of the artist’s papers to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. He is also Executive Director of the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation, which preserves and promotes the work of American abstract artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011).