By TED LOOS
Published: June 28, 2012
SOME time in the mid 1970s Dorothy Lichtenstein stopped by her husband’s studio on the Bowery one day after lunch, expecting to find him at work on a new painting.
But instead of creating, the Pop master Roy Lichtenstein was intent on an act of destruction.
Using a matte knife, Lichtenstein — who had long been a household name for his Benday dot paintings of the 1960s — was slashing away at several earlier works, small and colorful abstractions dating to the late ’50s.
“He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” Ms. Lichtenstein recalled recently. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ”
They managed to grab a few of the paintings and tucked them away. Now three of them, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her large trove of her husband’s works, are appearing in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a major exhibition of work by the artist, who died in 1997, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until Sept 3.
“In a way I’m hesitant to lend them since Roy was destroying them,” Ms. Lichtenstein, 72, said, seated in the living area of the large West Village complex, created from several buildings, that serves as her New York residence and also houses her husband’s last studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which she started to preserve the legacy of her husband, whom she married in 1968.
Ms. Lichtenstein added that she assumed he simply wasn’t happy with the early pieces, but that they may round out the public’s perception of his work.
“I think it’s good to have them there,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed in 1961. He had a somewhat tortured career as an artist before that. He used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, driving in from Ohio and going from gallery to gallery.”
Merely by saving them in the first place, Ms. Lichtenstein helped shape the Chicago show, which features more than 170 works and will eventually travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris.
But her influence is felt more pervasively too, since she lent dozens more works for the exhibition from her personal holdings, which number in the hundreds. And the foundation, of which Ms. Lichtenstein is the president, also lent pieces to the show.
Flipping through the catalog and referring to the lender identifications, she said cheerily, “Where it just says ‘private collection,’ that’s usually me.”
The organizers of the retrospective said that Ms. Lichtenstein’s participation was crucial.
“The biggest thing for us in the beginning is that she blessed this project,” said James Rondeau, chairman of the contemporary department at the Art Institute, who organized the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of modern and contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We wouldn’t have been able to move ahead without it.”
“A lot of people have come to her and wanted to do this,” he added. “Sometimes she has encouraged smaller shows, but nothing on this scale.”
Ms. Lichtenstein, who spends much of her year in Florida and the Hamptons, confirmed that there is no shortage of requests to lend crossing her desk. She often parts with one or two pieces here and there.
But she had been feeling that her husband was due for a “really major show”; his last full-on retrospective was in 1993, at the Guggenheim Museum, when Lichtenstein was still alive.
The Chicago show has many of the Pop paintings that audiences may already know, like “Drowning Girl” (1963), but Mr. Rondeau said that he was particularly pleased to feature nearly 50 works on paper, a medium that was not included in the 1993 show.
Ms. Lichtenstein encouraged Mr. Rondeau to pore through 70 boxes of works on paper that are kept in storage. “She had never given access to those before,” he said.
The focus on drawings pleased Ms. Lichtenstein, she said, because they “show Roy’s hand more” and make clear that he wasn’t just an artist who appropriated from comic books, but a master of composition in his own right.
But she stressed that she never tries to guide the hand of curators in terms of content. “I always love to see somebody else’s ideas and interpretations,” she said. “I’ll see things in a new light.”
On special occasions, however, she will get involved behind the scenes, if she knows works that the curators want to include are in other hands. For “Picasso and American Art,” a 2006 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she wrote two letters to collectors who own major Lichtensteins, encouraging them to lend. “I knew how important Picasso was to Roy,” she said. One letter did the trick; the other was a no-go.
For the Chicago show Ms. Lichtenstein went a step further. She knew that Agnes Gund, the renowned collector and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, was being asked to lend one of the most famous works of the Pop era, “Masterpiece” (1962), in which a blonde tells a square-jawed artist, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”
Ms. Lichtenstein said that she surprised Ms. Gund, a friend, by offering another Lichtenstein work of the same size and shape so that she wouldn’t have a blank space on her wall for the run of the exhibition. “Masterpiece” did end up in the Chicago show.
Mr. Rondeau said that such diplomacy and effectiveness were typical of Ms. Lichtenstein’s efforts.
“She’s dedicated a huge amount of her life to protecting Roy’s legacy,” he said. “Not all artists’ spouses choose to manage and maintain that mantle. She feels it acutely and acts on it. She sees this as her job.”
