Roy Lichtenstein, Like New: the Whitney's pop retrospective opens

Pop art never really left, but this autumn it's back at full volume. Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on 11 October and runs until 10 May 2027. It's a sprawling retrospective of roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s to the 1990s. The work spans painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and film. (Christie's autumn preview put the number above 150. We're going with the museum's own figure.)

A debut, reunited

The show's centrepiece is a reunion. For the first time, the Whitney brings back together all the works from Lichtenstein's first exhibition of Pop-style work, at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. The museum describes it as the moment that came to define an era. Seeing those pictures together again is a rare chance to feel what it was like when they first arrived. They were cheeky, flat and startlingly direct.

The exhibition is organised by Meg Onli, the Whitney's Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, with the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator. Pairing a curator with a working artist suggests an interest in Lichtenstein as a maker, someone thinking hard about how images are built, not just what they show.

Why "Like New"?

Lichtenstein took the throwaway images of his time, like comics, adverts and commercial printing, and remade them. The results look crisp and machine-made but were meticulously made by hand. As Christie's points out in its autumn preview, his explorations of image culture and duplication feel more relevant than ever in a world of endlessly copied and filtered pictures. "Like New" hints at that: something second-hand, presented as fresh.

Familiar favourites are here, including Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963) and Artist's Studio "The Dance" (1974). There's also a recreation of three murals, among them a nearly 96-foot version of Greene Street Mural (1983). The show also includes work by Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant, artists who took copying and appropriation further still.

New York's autumn, at a glance

The Whitney show lands in an extraordinary season for the city's museums:

• The Met opened Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous on 4 October.
• MoMA opened The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors the same day. It's a show of artists' books by figures including Breton, Dalí and Ernst, anchored by the Helen and Sam Zell Collection.
• The Guggenheim gave its whole rotunda to Taryn Simon from 18 September.
• The Morgan opens Rembrandt's Lions on 23 October.

Bringing Pop home

Lichtenstein's lessons are easy to borrow: primary colours, confident black lines, and dots used as texture. You don't need to copy him. Graphic prints with bold primaries and halftone patterns carry the same energy, and they look as fresh now as they did in 1962.