Whitney Museum of American Art. October 2026. Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. Over 130 works across painting, sculpture, drawing, film, and installation.
The exhibition spans Lichtenstein's comic-derived paintings and his earlier, lesser-exhibited work. Scale is significant: this is the largest Lichtenstein museum survey in New York since the Museum of Modern Art's 1987 career retrospective.
Lichtenstein died in 1997. His market remains active. Christie's sold Nurse for $95.4 million in 2015, his auction record. The estate, managed by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, controls licensing and exhibition loans.
The Whitney has not staged a major Pop Art single-artist survey since the 2018 Andy Warhol retrospective. Like New arrives 39 years after MoMA's last comprehensive Lichtenstein presentation.
The gap between major New York museum surveys underscores how selectively institutions have revisited Lichtenstein's output. Nearly four decades separate MoMA's retrospective from the Whitney's forthcoming presentation, a silence that allowed secondary-market activity and foundation-controlled loans to shape public access to the artist's range. By including early, lesser-exhibited work alongside the comic-derived paintings that defined his commercial profile, the Whitney positions itself to reframe a legacy often flattened into a handful of signature images.
That the Whitney last mounted a comparable Pop Art undertaking with its Warhol retrospective further clarifies the stakes: Lichtenstein now receives parallel institutional attention, reinforcing the museum's role as a periodic arbiter of postwar American art history.
First verifiable public date: October 2026 opening at Whitney Museum, New York.