Roy LichtensteinVereinigte Staaten, 1923–1997

Alka Seltzer

1966 · Drawing and Watercolor

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Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Vereinigte Staaten

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Unverändert seit: 19. Aug. 2026
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Über das Werk

Roy Lichtenstein had been exhibiting in galleries for nearly ten years when, in 1961, he dramatically changed the course of his work. Prompted by the comic strips on his children’s gum wrappers, he began to create paintings based on cartoon images. The reductive style that soon emerged became his particular contribution to the idiom known as Pop Art. From around 1961 until 1968, the artist created a group of highly finished black-and-white drawings that demonstrate his subversive use of commercial illustration techniques. In Alka Seltzer, Lichtenstein exploited everyday practices of visual representation and magnified them, indicating the gas bubbles rising over the glass by meticulously scraping away extra spaces from a field of imitation hand-stenciled Benday dots.

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To signify the reflective surface of the glass, he drew flat black graphite shapes—a parody, like the dots, of the reductive, linecut effect of pulp advertising. The artist’s use of mechanical reproduction conventions served to unify his composition and produce movement and volume on a two-dimensional surface. Alka Seltzer is one of Lichtenstein’s watershed works because it shows the artist summing up his early graphic techniques and introducing what would become his most significant formal preoccupations in the years that followed.

Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0

Angaben

Inventarnummer: 1993.176

What it shows

Medicine Beverages Cups

Im Katalog

Pop Art Vereinigte Staaten

Quellen

Art Institute of Chicago: the museum's own open data · abgerufen vor 5 Tagen
Bild: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder

Derweil im Leben von Roy Lichtenstein

Das ganze Leben

1963–1964
Leaves Rutgers and returns to New York
In September 1963 Lichtenstein took a leave of absence from Douglass College at Rutgers; in 1964 he moved back to New York to be at the centre of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers to concentrate on his painting.
1964
The first American to exhibit at the Tate Gallery
Lichtenstein became the first American to exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London, in the show “’54–’64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade”.
1964
Life magazine asks: “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”
When Lichtenstein’s work was first exhibited, many critics challenged its originality and called it vulgar and empty; a Life magazine article of 1964 was headed “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”. The artist replied that the closer his work is to the original, the more threatening and critical its content.
1967
First museum retrospective in Pasadena
In 1967 the Pasadena Art Museum in California held Lichtenstein’s first museum retrospective.
1967
First solo exhibitions in Europe
In the same year, 1967, Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibition in Europe was held at museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hannover.
1968
Married: Dorothy Lichtenstein