Based on romance and war comics, advertisements, and product packaging, the works in Lichtenstein’s first one-person exhibition at Leo Castelli’s uptown New York gallery in early 1962 challenged prevailing ideas about originality, authorship, and what counted as serious art. For some viewers, the paintings—executed to look like copies of printed matter—felt startlingly novel and fresh; for others, vulgar or imitative. Castelli, the influential dealer who had launched the careers of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, immediately recognized the groundbreaking importance of Lichtenstein’s new paintings. The exhibition established the visual language that would come to define Lichtenstein’s art: flattened forms, bold outlines, primary colors, and simulated Benday dots, the uniform dot pattern used in commercial printing to build planes of color and tone. Moreover, the paradox of repetition as reinvigoration would remain central to Lichtenstein’s practice for decades to come. This gallery re-creates this pivotal exhibition in its entirety.
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