Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings 1961-1968

Between 1961 and 1968, at the height of the Pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) created about 50 large black-and-white drawings. Not only was their imagery, culled from consumer culture, entirely new–baked potatoes, ads for foot medication and BB Guns–but so was their treatment, which drew on the rudimentary character of cheaply printed commercial drawings. Conceived independently from Lichtenstein’s paintings, these drawings recast illustrations from newspaper ads and comic books into works of keen visual intensity, curiously echoing the clean-edge aesthetic of 1960s geometric abstraction. “Drawing is the basis of my art,” Lichtenstein later affirmed; “It is where my thinking takes place.” Published for an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, this richly illustrated publication offers 120 color illustrations, plus essays on Lichtenstein’s technique and on his little-known 1967 Aspen project, in which the artist transformed a room into a black-and-white cartoon drawing.