Roy Lichtenstein Has Lost His Luster at the Whitney

The first major Roy Lichtenstein survey in more than 30 years has opened at the Whitney Museum, and our reviewer left unmoved. "Roy Lichtenstein: Like New" gathers more than 130 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. The charm is intact. The allure, apparently, is not.

By Daniel Okafor

Lichtenstein's paintings stick in your mind. They are memorable, congenial, and — by one honest account — emotionally empty. The critic filing from the Whitney expected surprises from the curators' research into the artist's sources. They were not initially disappointed. Then the show got clever.

What does the exhibition actually deliver?

The strongest material sits near the beginning. It concerns Hoyt Sherman, the Ohio State University teacher Lichtenstein credited with teaching him how to see. The devotion was total: Lichtenstein gave his first son the middle name "Hoyt" and, after finding success, endowed the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at the university in the 1990s.

Sherman ran an experimental program with a method that inverted the traditional life-drawing class. Students saw objects briefly in a darkened room, then drew them from memory. He called these sessions "Flash Labs." The Whitney has rebuilt one: a darkened room with a 15-minute video reenacting a Flash Lab, with artist Alex Da Corte — also a co-curator of the show — playing Sherman in prosthetics, playfully teaching the class. Lichtenstein works from the 1960s hang on the wall at different heights. The film, "Drawing by Seeing" (2026), runs 14:43.

How far do the recreations go?

Quite far. Da Corte and his team recreated four murals, including:

• "Greene Street Mural" (1983), nearly 100 feet (~30.5 m) in length
• "Super Sunset Billboard" (1967), installed in the museum's west-facing window — timed so visitors can watch two sunsets at once

That double sunset is the show's best gag and, arguably, its most honest one. Lichtenstein spent a career doubling images already mass-produced; the Whitney simply returns the favor.

Why does the critic say the luster is gone?

Here the review sharpens. The jokes, our critic argues, "muddied the waters of a famous artist widely celebrated for his charming, emotionally empty (or should I say repressed?) paintings drawn from comic strips, advertising, and paintings by other famous artists, including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Chinese classical masters such as Mi Youren."

That's the sting. Lichtenstein borrowed from Picasso, Monet and Mi Youren with the same deadpan he applied to romance comics. The survey's playful staging — prosthetics, murals, twin sunsets — keeps the mood light. The reviewer's suspicion is that the curators preferred it that way. "Perhaps they didn't want us to think too long about what happens when charm loses its allure."

It's a fair question, and the Whitney doesn't quite answer it. A 130-work survey, three decades in the waiting, gives an audience ample room to sit with an artist's limitations. The show instead offers distractions, expertly made. Flash Labs in the dark, a 100-foot mural, a billboard sunset. Lichtenstein would have appreciated the reproduction. Whether the 2026 audience still needs the charm is the question "Like New" raises and declines to resolve — which, for a Pop artist, may be the most faithful tribute of all.