The Engine

ROY LICHTENSTEIN at the TATE MODERN Roy Lichtensten (1923-1997) was born in New York City into an upper-middle class Jewish family. He studied fine art at Ohio State University during World War 2 then went to the army (1942-45). His father Milton was a real estate broker, managing parking lots and car parks. After the war he continued with his studies at university. Throughout the 1950s he learnt his craft by imitating the works of the European masters, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and learning from the art movements, surrealism, cubism, expressionism, they represented but ultimately either destroyed or lost his work from this period by 1960. He initially adopted then rebelled against the prevailing orthodoxy of abstract expressionism represented by the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko. However, his great breakthrough into a personal voice was his work 'Look Mickey' (1961). Lichtenstein found this image in his son's comic but hi...

SCHWITTERS IN BRITAIN at the TATE BRITAIN  Kurt Schwitters (1887- 1948) worked in Germany before World War 2, a member of the European avante garde based in Hannover in Niedersachsen, Germany. He initially became famous as the author of Dadaist poems and satires on traditional German love poems, sending up trite conventions of love and romance. He also worked as an artist, pioneering a form of Dadaism based on his preference for collage known as Merz, especially the Merzbau, two rooms of his own house in Hannover transformed into an installation (1929). Eventually his work was condemned by the Nazis and placed into the entarte – degenerate art exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Schwitters had been working in Norway since the early 1930s but now took unofficial exile in that country. Then, three years later, Norway fell to the Nazis necessitating Schwitter’s rapid move, along with his son Ernst, on an ice breaker to Britain in 1940. When he arrived in Britain, instead of ...