Roy Lichtenstein’s Whitney Retrospective Says He Saw the Repost Coming

The first thing you see in Roy Lichtenstein: Like New is a scroll. The Whitney’s retrospective, which opens to the public on Sunday (Oct. 11), starts with a nearly 100-foot re-creation of his 1983 “Greene Street Mural,” one of four murals rebuilt by guest curator Alex Da Corte’s studio. Da Corte told Hypebeast it should look familiar.

This scroll of symbols and images that Roy deployed in 1983 is very much like our constant river of images that we experience on social media feeds.

Alex Da Corte, guest curator, Hypebeast

That’s the show’s argument in one wall. Named for a 1962 work, Like New gathers more than 130 pieces from six decades of paintings, drawings, collages, prints, sculpture and even film. It’s the first New York retrospective of his work since 1993, according to the Whitney, and the hits are here, including “Look Mickey” (1961), “Drowning Girl” (1963) and “Happy Tears” (1964), per Time Out. Outside, a blown-up “Girl in Window” looks down from the museum’s balcony.

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The centerpiece is a gallery-within-a-gallery rebuild of his 1962 solo debut at Leo Castelli Gallery, which reunites all eight paintings from that show for the first time, Time Out reports. They include “Laughing Cat” (1961), a painting Andy Warhol once owned.

Then things get slippery. Lichtenstein lifted his images from comic books and newspapers, and the curators hang his work beside copies of copies: Elaine Sturtevant’s near-identical duplicate, for which he supplied the stencils, and a Richard Pettibone painting he signed as if it were his own. “Just because we can recognize something doesn’t mean we fully understand what it is,” co-curator Meg Onli told Hypebeast.

They also want you to look slower. Da Corte points to the pencil marks, erasures and palimpsests that glossy reproductions hide, and Onli notes that by 1965 Lichtenstein was already talking about his dots in relation to data. “Slowing down the way that you look at Lichtenstein was our desire from the jump,” Da Corte said.

None of this is news to streetwear. ARTnews counts Supreme (2006), Adidas, Moschino and Converse among Lichtenstein’s earlier fashion tie-ups, and on Oct. 7 Gap added an 18-piece collection made with the Whitney and the artist’s estate. “Standing Explosion” covers a hoodie and a varsity jacket, “Crying Girl” and “Girl in Window” are on graphic tees, dots from his Monet-inspired “Cathedral” series run across a sherpa quarter-zip, and “Sweet Dreams, Baby!” lands on a cap, per Hypebeast. The deepest cut is a sweater with “Laughing Cat,” the same painting reunited in the show.

The museum sees no contradiction. “This artist’s practice is deeply connected to popular culture and the process of reproduction,” Jack Sachs, the Whitney’s director of retail and licensing, told ARTnews.

Neither curator came to the show as a Pop specialist. Onli, the Whitney’s Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, organized its 2024 Biennial and previously led Noah Davis’ Underground Museum. Da Corte, a Venezuelan-American artist who showed at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is known for saturated takes on American pop culture, and across the street from the museum he has added a squirt of ketchup to his riff on Lichtenstein’s “Hot Dog” billboard.

Lichtenstein died in 1997, long before anyone scrolled a feed. Roy Lichtenstein: Like New runs on the Whitney’s fifth floor in New York through May 10, 2027.