Roy Lichtenstein’s Witty Critiques of Masculinity

The New Yorker · Hilton Als · 2026-11-02 11:00 UTC

The artist’s best work, in a new retrospective at the Whitney Museum, directs his campy humor at gender stereotypes, Hilton Als writes.

For years now, the Whitney has foregrounded race- and gender-based political art, and it’s a little trippy to walk around this show’s pearl-gray-painted rooms, looking at Lichtenstein’s Fantastik-clean white world of orderly studios, shiny blondes, and square-jawed men, in a place where white male power has been repeatedly denounced and the sins of past neglect redressed. No one can make up for the past—certainly not by demanding that it be corrected in the present—and it was perhaps inevitable that the Whitney would have to turn, or return, to white men with name recognition to get people back into its galleries post-COVID. Exhibitions devoted to Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol helped, and still fit the Whitney framework: both artists were queer. And although Lichtenstein wasn’t gay, there’s enough irony about gender in his early work to qualify him as being interestingly gay-adjacent.

Still, it’s difficult to entirely undo the way we’ve been viewing art for a while now, and, after having a great time at “Like New,” you may find yourself feeling slightly guilty about it. But one of the more poignant subtexts of the show is that it’s a reminder of the New York avant-garde in the sixties, and of what a beautiful, forceful energy there was to its various voices, with Lichtenstein the least dirty and anarchic of them all. There’s a sweetness in that, and a sadness, too.

In the Cold War universe, where everyone was isolated and class was defined by the power to acquire (and to oppress), Pop artists painted or sculpted what they saw and heard. The artist’s “aura” had no place in those works; instead, Pop art was a kind of supersonic whistle heralding the disasters to come, that had already come. But unlike, for instance, Rosenquist, in such charged political pieces as “F-111” (1964-65), which juxtaposes consumer objects with missiles, Lichtenstein made work that was less about conscience than about control, and the eradication of mess, of feeling.

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