At the Whitney, Lichtenstein Is Shown as the Artist Who Borrowed First

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has given Roy Lichtenstein a full career survey, and it is an elegant one. Its argument is that the American painter was the first great borrower of images, an artist who took pictures that already existed and made them his own long before that became ordinary practice. The show also suggests he saw today's appetite for images coming and chose to work with it on purpose rather than against it. For anyone who follows how an artist's reputation is built, and how it holds up over time, this is a New York institution putting its weight behind one of the country's best-known painters.

With reporting from ARTnews.