Download - Pinacothèque de Paris

Picasso and Braque. He takes a course in sculpture and, using a homemade
electric kiln, begins to create animal forms in ceramic and enamel. In 1942,
Lichtenstein enrolls in Professor Hoyt L. Sherman’s Drawing by Seeing course
where students sit in the dark and are expected to draw objects that have been
set up or suspended in the middle of a room and flashed with light for just a
second. Sherman’s theories on “organized perception” or visual and perceptual
unity form the basis for Lichtenstein’s work from that point forward.
In February 1943, Lichtenstein is drafted into the United States Army and leaves
OSU to report for active duty. As part of his military training, his unit is enrolled
at De Paul University in Chicago, Illinois, and he takes courses in engineering.
Following the completion of this Army Special Training Program, he goes to
Biloxi, Mississippi, where he briefly enters a pilot/navigator-training program,
which is then canceled. In a subsequent assignment, as a clerk and draftsman,
he enlarges cartoons from the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes for his
commanding officer. Due to the need for more combat soldiers overseas, in
December 1944, Lichtenstein’s Engineer Combat Battalion is shipped to England
and then to France, Belgium and Germany. He keeps a sketchbook and draws
landscapes and portraits of other soldiers. Letters home evidence his buying of
illustrated art books and a desire for more paper and drawing materials during
his overseas duty.
By the fall of 1945, he gains entry to history and French-language classes at the
Cité Universitaire in Paris. By December of that year, Lichtenstein is sent home
because his father is gravely ill. In January 1946, following his father’s death,
he receives an honorable discharge from the Army and is given the American
Service Medal among other distinctions. In March of that same year, Lichtenstein
returns to OSU and completes his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts in June. His
extant works from the time include Precolumbian-styled sculptures carved from
stone or done in terracotta or ceramic.
Lichtenstein accepts a position as an art instructor at OSU in September 1946.
Among the classes he teaches is Design 423 where he employs a “Flash Lab”
similar to Sherman’s and asks students to draw the afterimage of objects hastily
lit using big blocks of charcoal or crayon on newspaper. In January 1947, he
enters the graduate program at OSU. The following year, Lichtenstein is
included in a group show at an artists’ cooperative, the Ten-Thirty Gallery in
Cleveland, where he meets his future wife, Isabel Wilson, the gallery assistant.
He exhibits paintings of musicians, street workers, a racecar driver and even a
deepsea diver that are composed of simple biomorphic shapes and drawn
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