Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960 is the first major museum exhibition to investigate the early work of one of the best known American artists of the twentieth century. Co-organised by the Colby College Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the exhibition will include approximately 80 works from the artist's fruitful and formative early career drawn from both public and private collections, many never before seen by the public. The show and accompanying catalogue will include paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, which reveal an artist, even in the earliest stages of his career, with a keen interest in visual culture, culling - with a critical eye - from a wide range of sources, including fairy tales, folk and children's art, and mythic forms of Americana (from cowboys to Disney cartoon characters). These and other inspirations were the essential but little-known precursors to the artist's later sourcing of comic books and advertisements. Likewise, his exploration of abstraction, just before the artist's abrupt turn to Pop Art in 1961, straddles the line between unabashed lyricism and wry critique of second-generation Abstract Expressionism. The catalogue - which includes several essays offering new scholarship by leading experts in the field - provides an opportunity to more fully assess the artistic and cultural dynamism of postwar America through the lens of one of the twentieth-century's great masters.