A 32-foot-tall comic-book girl now looms over Manhattan's High Line, part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's sprawling new survey of Roy Lichtenstein, the first major New York retrospective of his work since 1993. Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opened Sunday, pulling together paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, film and murals spanning the artist's career from the early 1940s through the 1990s.
According to Spectrum News NY1, the show displays more than 130 works and reconstructs the Leo Castelli Gallery on the Upper East Side, recreating Lichtenstein's 1962 solo debut there. The Whitney's own account of the exhibition describes it as bringing together roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s, according to whitney.org, while the Guardian put the count at more than 130 works spanning six decades — a discrepancy the sources do not resolve.
A Castelli Debut, Reassembled Decades Later
The reconstructed gallery reunites, for the first time, works from Lichtenstein's first exhibition of Pop-style work at Castelli in 1962, per the Whitney. That original show ran from February 10 through March 3, 1962, at 4 East 77th Street, according to the gallery's own blog post marking the occasion. Spectrum News NY1 reports that the works in the reconstruction had not been displayed together since the early 1980s, and that The Kiss was last seen in New York in 1993 — while Andy Warhol's Laughing Cat, also part of that era, reportedly has not been seen publicly in over 30 years.
Those 1962 paintings marked a sharp break from the Abstract Expressionist mainstream. The works were figurative, public, mechanical-looking and ironic, the Castelli gallery's own account notes. The Whitney frames Lichtenstein's output from that period as more than simple mimicry of mass media, with the show emphasizing sophisticated questions of optics and perception, as described by the Guardian.
Da Corte's Towering Additions
Guest curator Alex Da Corte, working alongside Whitney curator Meg Onli, contributed large-scale tributes built specifically for the show, including the 32-foot sculpture based on Girl in Window installed on the museum's fifth-floor terrace, per Spectrum News NY1's report. The New York Times describes the piece as a reproduction of the 1963 work, visible from the High Line, while Artsy identifies the outdoor piece as based on a 1964 work — an inconsistency the sources leave unresolved. Da Corte and his studio also produced a nearly 96-foot-long version of Lichtenstein's 1983 Greene Street Mural for the galleries inside, according to the New York Times.
Da Corte's contributions extend beyond sculpture. He stars in a new video as Hoyt L. Sherman, the Ohio State teacher who shaped Lichtenstein's early visual thinking, the Times reports. Onli and Da Corte are credited as the exhibition's organizers, with Nakai Falcón and David Crane rounding out the curatorial team, according to the Whitney's press materials.
From Paul Bunyan to Pop Icon
The show traces Lichtenstein's evolution from obscurity to icon. Spectrum News NY1 reports that his first documented work was a 1942 drawing of Paul Bunyan, long before he became a defining figure of the Pop art movement in the 1960s while keeping a studio in Manhattan's West Village. The exhibition's galleries include celebrated paintings such as Look Mickey, Girl with Ball, Masterpiece, Drowning Girl, Happy Tears and Artist's Studio “The Dance,” per the Whitney's press release.
Lichtenstein, born in 1923, died in 1997 at age 73, the Whitney notes. He drew much of his signature imagery from comic books and newspapers, enlarging and transferring it to canvas, a method the museum says shaped his career-long investigation into image culture and influenced generations of artists who followed. The Whitney is simultaneously presenting a smaller companion show, Roy Lichtenstein: 1997, focused on work from the final year of his life, according to Downtown Magazine NYC.
What Onli Hopes Visitors Take Away
Meg Onli, who holds the title of Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney, hopes visitors come away understanding Lichtenstein's interest in the circulation and recontextualization of images, Spectrum News NY1 reports. That theme runs through Artsy's description of the show as a sustained study of how images get copied, enlarged, circulated and altered — the same preoccupation that drove the artist from his earliest comic-derived canvases to the monumental murals now filling the Whitney's galleries.
Like New runs at the Whitney through May 10, 2027, according to Downtown Magazine NYC. ArtNews has called it the third Lichtenstein retrospective staged in the United States in the past 35 years, and the Guardian notes the Whitney's relationship with the artist stretches back to 1965, when his work first appeared in a Whitney annual exhibition. Elsewhere, the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center are jointly presenting Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio through mid-August, while the Guggenheim Museum's Guggenheim Pop remains on view through January 2027, per Artsy's roundup of concurrent shows.
