The artist Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923 in New York. In 1939 Lichtenstein began his studies at the 'Art Students League' under Reginald Marsh, one year later he transfered to Ohio State College, to which he returned for another three years after serving as a soldier in Europe for three years between 1943 and 1946. Afterwards he began teaching at Ohio State College until 1951. During the following six years, Roy Lichtenstein lived in Cleveland, where he practiced several occupations aside from painting and drawing. In 1957 he moved to New York, where he worked as a teacher at the 'State College of Education' in Oswego. During the 1950s his work was still dominated by fairytale-like motifs in primitive figurativeness. In the mid 1950s, however, Lichtenstein turned towards contemporary image contents. In 1962 the painter took part in one of the first major Pop Art exhibitions entitled 'New Realists' in the 'Sidney Janis Gallery' in New York. His first exhibition in Europe took place two years later at the 'Ilena Sonnabend Gallery' in Paris. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad followed. In 1963 Philip Johnson, architect of the New York pavilion for the New York world exhibition, commissioned Lichtenstein to produce a mural for the pavilion. The artist continously tried new image subjects and artistic techniques. In 1965/66 he produced works in ceramics alongside painting his first 'brushstroke' picture. During this time, Roy Lichtenstein also began to look into Art Déco. At Gemini G.E.L.'s workshop the artist began to produce his first silk-screen prints in 1969. Roy Lichtenstein's most famous pictures show dramatic figurative scenes in the style of American comic strips. Lichtenstein also produced series of Expressionist woodcuts and Impressionist landcapes. The artist applied collage techniques and played with advertising vocabulary and Abstract Art. During the 1990s he discovered the female nude and Chinese landscape painting as an image object and created numerous monumantal works including sculptures and several murals. His work has been celebrated in important retrospectives around the world. Roy Lichtenstein died on September 29, 1997 in New York. His motifs remain in everyone's memory as icons of Pop Art.