Whitney opens first New York retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein in over 30 years

On 11 October 2026 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opened 'Roy Lichtenstein: Like New', the first New York retrospective of the Pop artist since 1993. Running until 10 May 2027 on the museum's fifth floor, the exhibition gathers many of Lichtenstein's best-known paintings alongside lesser-known works, four re-created murals, and examples of his drawing, sculpture, film and printmaking across six decades.

Lichtenstein, born in Manhattan in 1923 and raised in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side, stunned the art world in the early 1960s by enlarging panels from comic books and advertisements onto canvas, imitating the black outlines, flat colours and printed dots of commercial printing while painting everything by hand. The Whitney describes him as an appropriation artist long before the term existed. He worked in New York and Southampton until his death in 1997.

The show, named after a 1962 painting, is organised by the Whitney's Meg Onli with the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator. It argues that Lichtenstein's lifelong interest in how images are copied, altered and recirculated makes him newly relevant in an age of endlessly generated and reposted pictures. To make the point, the museum has mounted a 32-foot replica of his 1964 World's Fair mural 'Girl in Window' on the outside of the building facing the High Line, and Da Corte has installed a giant outdoor 'Hot Dog With Ketchup' derived from Lichtenstein's small 1964 'Hot Dog'.

Writing in the Forward, Dan Friedman noted that questions of copying and originality carried a particular charge for Jews in the early 20th century, when antisemitic critics in Europe accused Jews of merely imitating the culture of others, and placed Lichtenstein's embrace of reproduction in that wider history.