11 October 2026 — 10 May 2027

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

When Roy Lichtenstein's breakthrough Pop paintings were first shown in the early 1960s, they stunned both the art world and the country. An appropriation artist long before art historians had a name for it, Lichtenstein drew his imagery from comic books and newspapers, reworking and refining his compositions before enlarging them and transferring them to canvas. Cool, crisp, and seemingly mechanical yet unmistakably made by hand, his paintings—imitating the bold black outlines, flat bright colors, and fields of dots of commercial printing—overturned conventional ideas of what a work of art could be. Yet his legacy reaches well beyond Pop: his lifelong investigation of image culture has shaped generations of artists and changed the way we see and understand pictures. Born in 1923, Lichtenstein spent most of his life in New York and Southampton, sustaining a constantly evolving practice until his death in 1997 at the age of seventy-three. Taking its title from a 1962 work, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New presents many of his most iconic paintings alongside lesser-known works and four re-created murals. The first New York retrospective of his work since 1993, it traces his fascination with perception across six decades of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and prints. In an age when images are endlessly generated, copied, altered, filtered, and reposted across screens, Lichtenstein's art feels strikingly prescient and remarkably relevant. Long before the digital era, he understood that images are never stable: they travel through the world and come back transformed—with each iteration, made like new. The exhibition is organized by Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator, with Nakai Falcón, Curatorial Assistant, and David Crane, Curatorial Research Associate.

Whitney Museum of American Art