Roy Lichtenstein - Art Market

Art Market

Since the 1950s Lichtenstein's work has been exhibited in New York and elsewhere with Leo Castelli at his gallery and at Castelli Graphics as well as with Ileana Sonnabend in her gallery in Paris, and at the Ferus Gallery, Pace Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Mary Boone, Brooke Alexander, Carlebach, Rosa Esman, Marilyn Pearl, James Goodman, John Heller, Blum Helman, Hirschl & Adler, Phyllis Kind, Getler Pall, Condon Riley, 65 Thompson Street, Holly Solomon, and Sperone Westwater Galleries among others. Leo Castelli Gallery represented Lichtenstein exclusively since 1962, when a solo show by the artist sold out before it opened.

Beginning in 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Gagosian Gallery has been exhibiting work by Lichtenstein since 1996.

Big Painting No. 6 (1965) became the highest priced Lichtenstein work in 1970. Like the entire Brushstrokes series, the subject of the painting is the process of Abstract Expressionist painting via sweeping brushstrokes and drips, but the result of Lichtenstein's simplification that uses a Ben-Day dots background is a representation of the mechanical/industrial color printing reproduction.

Lichtenstein's painting Torpedo...Los! (1963) sold at Christie's for $5.5 million in 1989, a record sum at the time, making him one of only three living artists to have attracted such huge sums. In 2005, In the Car was sold for a then record $16.2m (£10m).

In 2010 his cartoon-style 1964 painting Ohhh...Alright..., previously owned by Steve Martin and later by Steve Wynn, was sold at a record US $42.6m (£26.7m) at a sale at Christies in New York.

Based on a 1961 William Overgard drawing for a Steve Roper cartoon story, Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room!...and There's Nobody in It! (1961) depicts a man looking through a hole in a door. It was sold by collector Courtney Sale Ross for $43 million, double its estimate, at Christie's in New York City in 2011; the seller's husband, Steve Ross had acquired it at auction in 1988 for $2.1 million. The painting measures four-foot by four-foot and is in graphite and oil.

In 2012 the comic painting Sleeping Girl (1964) from the collection of Beatrice and Phillip Gersh established a new Lichtenstein record $44.8 million at Sotheby's.

In October 2012 his painting "Electric Cord" (1962) was returned to Leo Castelli's widow Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, after having been missing for 42 years. Castelli had sent the painting to an art restorer for cleaning in January 1970, and never got it back. He died in 1999. In 2006, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation published an image of the painting on its holiday greeting card and asked the art community to help find it. The painting was found in a New York warehouse, after recently being displayed in Bogota, Colombia.