NEW YORK — The Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective Sunday, bringing together roughly 130 works in an exhibition that reexamines the Pop art figure through his lifelong fascination with copying, perception and the movement of images through mass culture. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” on view through May 10, 2027, is the first New York retrospective devoted to the artist since 1993. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”2″}

The exhibition spans Lichtenstein’s career from his formative work in the 1940s through the 1990s, moving well beyond the comic-strip paintings that made him one of the most recognizable American artists of the postwar era. The Whitney has assembled paintings, drawings, collages, sculpture, prints and film, presenting the familiar Pop vocabulary of heavy black outlines, flat colors and mechanically inspired dots alongside earlier and less widely seen experiments.

Among the works identified by the museum are “Look Mickey” from 1961, “Girl with Ball” from 1961, “Masterpiece” from 1962, “Drowning Girl” from 1963, “Happy Tears” from 1964 and “Little Big Painting” from 1965. The presentation also includes later work that demonstrates how Lichtenstein repeatedly turned to existing visual systems — commercial printing, advertising, comics and art history — and then transformed them through enlargement, simplification and painstaking hand production. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”3″}

A major element of the Whitney show is its focus on the tension between mechanical appearance and manual execution. Lichtenstein’s paintings often looked as though they had been industrially printed, but their apparently standardized surfaces were carefully constructed by hand. That contradiction became central to his practice: the artwork could resemble an impersonal reproduction while remaining the product of repeated artistic decisions about scale, composition, line and color.

The Whitney is also using the retrospective to revisit questions of appropriation that have followed Lichtenstein’s work for decades. He drew heavily from comics, newspaper imagery, advertisements and other circulating images, frequently transforming source material that already belonged to mass visual culture. Rather than treating those borrowings only as a historical controversy, the exhibition frames them as part of a broader inquiry into what happens when an image is copied, translated, enlarged, displaced and presented in a new context.

That approach gives the show a conspicuously contemporary dimension. Images today routinely move between phones, social platforms, advertisements, memes and generative software, accumulating edits and new meanings with every circulation. The museum argues that Lichtenstein understood decades before the social-media era that images are unstable objects whose meaning can shift as they are reproduced and reframed. The retrospective’s title, “Like New,” points directly to that cycle of transformation. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”4″}

The exhibition also reconstructs parts of Lichtenstein’s history that ordinarily cannot be experienced intact. The Whitney says it has reunited, for the first time, all the works from the artist’s first exhibition of Pop-style work at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. That presentation helped establish the visual language that would define Lichtenstein’s public identity and become one of the central strands of American Pop art.

Another major installation recreates Lichtenstein’s “Greene Street Mural,” originally produced in 1983. The Whitney presentation includes a version extending nearly 96 feet, turning the mural into one of the exhibition’s largest-scale encounters with the artist’s interest in how images change when translated from one format and architectural setting into another. The museum says the exhibition contains multiple recreated murals alongside original objects. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”5″}

The curatorial team is led by Meg Onli, the Whitney’s Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and artist Alex Da Corte, serving as guest curator, with Nakai Falcón and David Crane. Their approach places Lichtenstein’s best-known images in conversation with preparatory work, less familiar material and examples of his influence on other artists. Works by figures including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant are incorporated to examine how Lichtenstein himself became a source to be copied, cited and reinterpreted. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”6″}

The retrospective also highlights the importance of perception to Lichtenstein’s artistic development. During his studies at Ohio State University, he encountered unconventional approaches to visual recognition associated with professor Hoyt L. Sherman. The Whitney has connected those early experiences to Lichtenstein’s later concern with how viewers identify and process images — especially when visual information is simplified, enlarged or shown only indirectly.

Opening-day programming extended those ideas beyond the galleries. On Sunday, the Whitney scheduled all-ages activities including collaborative mural-making with tape and colored shapes and a printmaking program developed with Blackburn Printshop. The events coincided with the museum’s Free Second Sundays program, linking a major historical retrospective to hands-on demonstrations of pattern, reproduction and image construction. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”7″}

The exhibition arrives as museums continue to reassess canonical postwar artists by widening the context around famous works rather than simply presenting familiar masterpieces chronologically. At the Whitney, Lichtenstein is positioned not only as a creator of instantly recognizable Pop surfaces but as an artist preoccupied with the mechanics of seeing: how visual information is produced, replicated, recognized and changed.

That interpretation also complicates the idea that Lichtenstein’s work belongs mainly to a particular moment of 1960s consumer culture. His comic-inspired imagery may remain inseparable from the rise of Pop, but the processes behind it — selection, cropping, borrowing, duplication and recirculation — now resemble basic operations of contemporary image culture. The museum’s argument is that the technical environment has changed while many of the questions Lichtenstein pursued have become more pervasive.

“Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” is on view on the Whitney’s fifth floor through May 10, 2027. Its New York opening gives the fall museum season a high-profile examination of an artist whose work once challenged the boundary between commercial imagery and fine art — a boundary that, in the era of endlessly reproducible digital images, has become even more difficult to define. :chatgpt-content-reference{index=”8″}