In New York, Roy Lichtenstein feels more modern than ever

Rare is the retrospective that can be described as both revelatory and snappy, but such is the dynamic range of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. Titled after a 1962 doubletake on canvas, the finely calibrated blockbuster looks with fresh eyes at an artist best known for his role in igniting and defining the Pop Art movement. But wait, as one of the newspaper ads Lichtenstein harvested for source material might promise, there’s more!

Spanning some 130 works and 6 decades, the exhibition unfolds across New York City’s largest openplan museum gallery – a.k.a., the 1700-square-metre fifth floor of the Whitney, Renzo Piano’s urban-industrial jazz suite of a structure. The space is bracketed by the High Line and the Hudson River seen through floor-to-ceiling windows, and curators Meg Onli and Alex Da Corte have seized it for a show not simply of aggregation but of syncopation.

Beyond the gallery walls, a 9-metre-high aluminum brushstroke sculpture communes with skyscrapers, a hot dog billboard looms over street food carts like a religious icon (complete with ketchup stigmata added by Da Corte), and an 18-piece Gap collection includes a fuzzy quarter-zip covered in giant Ben-Day dots.

'The show is full of masterpieces, iconic works, and rigorous scholarship, but it also has a sensibility that brings Lichtenstein’s work into the present,' said Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney, at the press preview. 'We knew it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity.'

Since Lichtenstein’s last retrospective in his hometown of Manhattan (at the Guggenheim in 1993, just 4 years before his death at age 73), the Whitney has acquired a trove of 400 Lichtenstein works as well as the artist’s studio and adjacent home on nearby Washington Street. These gifts from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation were vital in informing the present exhibition’s multifaceted view, which extends to the 365- page thrill ride of a catalogue designed by Irma Boom, a huge Lichtenstein fan.

The curatorial duo of Onli and Da Corte began by confronting the ubiquity of Lichtenstein. 'The work was everywhere, but in my mind, strangely also always on the surface. I wasn’t so sure of his conceptual practice,' said Da Corte, a conceptual artist himself. 'When we began thinking about what the show could be, we went to Roy’s voice and how he spoke about this work in the time that he made it.'

Lichtenstein embedded his work with oppositions that are enduringly compelling to perceive. Yet now more than ever, those tensions hide in plain sight. He achieved the effortless look of mechanical reproduction entirely by hand, taking pains to erase all traces of craft. He delighted in oversimplifying colours and lines (a ploy he described as 'mock insensitivity'), only to expertly manipulate them through size, shape, and juxtaposition. He made the ephemeral – fugitive subjects such as sunsets, brushstrokes, and mirror reflections – concrete, riffing on art history along the way. (The famed Drowning Girl ruminates on “Brad,” but that wave points to Hokusai.)

'I don’t draw a picture in order to reproduce it,' Lichtenstein said in a 1967 interview. 'I do it in order to recompose it.' The show explores how. To do so, it defies chronology to illuminate gesture and process, experimentation and discovery, across thematic groupings that include a painting-for-painting recreation of Lichtenstein’s first solo show at Leo Castelli’s uptown New York gallery in 1962, a satisfying journey through the brushstroke motif (“Pop Abstraction”), and a playful take on the Artist’s Studios scenes of fictional interiors. The sections reference and reinforce one another, so that even a room devoted to seriality operates profoundly in parallel.

The show begins on an architectural scale with the 29-metre-long Greene Street Mural, a visual greatest hits album that plays all the tracks at once. Originally painted in 1983 on the back wall of Castelli’s newly opened SoHo gallery, it’s the largest of the exhibition’s four recreated murals, which were all done by hand. 'It’s a beautiful mural of icons that Roy had used and would use in time,' said Onli. 'We wanted to meet the moment and give people what they think they know about Roy right away – it’s big, it’s bodied, it’s graphic, it’s instant – and then slow it down.' The experience is paced by vitrines nestled within the mural that contain preparatory drawings, maquettes, and Polaroids. Stand back, look closer, repeat.

What snaps the entire show into focus is the Flash Lab, a section exploring Lichtenstein’s formative years at Ohio State University (OSU) studying under Hoyt L. Sherman, a charismatic professor of fine arts who was obsessed with the nature of human perception and how it could be sharpened. Fueled by intuition, wartime grant money, and anecdotal findings from cohorts ranging from art students to American football players and budding dentists, Sherman backed into principles of sensory physiology – how the visual system processes information – but obscured his discoveries with glibly oracular prose that smacks of L. Ron Hubbard.

'I think most people dismissed him as some kind of a nut,' Lichtenstein said of Sherman in a 1963 interview. 'I had the feeling he knew just what he was saying, but you can’t understand him until you’re able to do it and see it.' The doing and seeing took place in the dark of OSU’s Flash Lab, where Sherman directed students to look at a focal point on a screen, then flashed up a slide for a fraction of a second and had students draw what they had seen. With no time to scan the image by moving their eyes, the students would gradually adapt to a “unified” way of seeing, taking in the whole rather than indexing the parts.

'Roy cited Hoyt Sherman as the person that taught him how to see the world,' said Da Corte, who embodies Sherman in a 15-minute video work. 'So much of what the Flash Lab taught was that it’s not about what you see actively but how you remember what you see.' The show’s darkened space becomes a point around which to orient the retrospective, a kind of big bang for an artist whose impact was not merely a flash or a Pop but all-caps wallop: POW! The work radiates from it as in one of Lichtenstein’s explosions: BLAM, WHAM, VAROOM!

Ideas of doubling and repetition billow and ricochet through the exhibition, in which a recreated Super Sunset Billboard (1967) is placed to echo the museum’s western exposure, but it’s the Mirrors (1969–72) that are impossible to look away from. 'We were interested in creating an almost religious experience with these works, of being in a space that was reflective without reflection,' said Onli. A rounded, silverywalled room is ringed with eight of the canvases—the most every assembled for a retrospective. They flicker between objects and portholes, funhouse fodder and phases of the moon. They isolate and simplify, reflecting nothing, or everything all at once. They look like new.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New is on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, until 10 May 2027