Tate Introductions: Lichtenstein

When he died on 29 September 1997 at the New York University Medical Center, due to complications with pneumonia, he was mourned as an artist whose ‘whole strategy of appropriation paved the way for a generation of artists not yet born’.

Thus the unbridled conviction of the happenings inspired Lichtenstein’s own artistic breakthrough. He said of them: ‘Happenings used more whole and more American subject matter than the Abstract Expressionists used’.

‘I really don’t think that art can be gross and over-simplified and remain art,’ said Lichtenstein in an interview with John Coplans in 1972, ‘I mean, it must have some subtleties, and it must yield to aesthetic unity, otherwise it’s not art’.