Holly HY / 04 January 2026 / Categories: Arts & Entertainment, Arts Galleries

Roy Fox Lichtenstein 1923 - 1997 an American Modern Art Icon - Whaam at Tate Modern London

Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! at Tate Modern: Pop Art Icon Explained

Over 10 years ago Tate Modern presented a retrospective of one of the great American pop art artists of the twentieth century.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective was the first full-scale retrospective of this important artist in over twenty years. Co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, this momentous show brought together 125 of his most definitive paintings and sculptures. They are the type of paintings so familiar in our modern culture you recognise them even if you don’t remember the artists name, I am a fan and sometimes I struggle to bring it to the front of my memory when I see his work, so completely unique and distinguishable from other modern artists.

I didn’t realise when I visited Tate modern, an image I’ve had at home, purchased years ago, a print, Whaam, was part of the Tate’s permanent collection and I was shocked to see it as I wondered around the rooms taking everything in.

Although you do have to pay for special exhibitions, if you went to see the Roy (Fox) Lichtenstein retrospective back in 2013 you’d have paid between £16 and £20 entry, there was a two for one deal in the Sunday Times at the time, going in today to see Whaam didn’t cost a penny as Entry to Tate Modern's main collection is free for everyone, though members of the museum, worth considering if you live close by and like to go a lot, get free special exhibition entry without booking. FYI if you want to purchase anything on your visit, coffee shop, gift shop the gallery is cashless, accepting only card/contactless payments.

The scale of restored Whaam is probably the most striking. It’s massive and you can really see the dot and line work jump off the canvas, inspired by comic strips and advertisements, the artist used his techniques to tell a story of commercialism, and consumerism and cross the chasm between art and media printing and imagery. But he wasn’t limited to just comic strips, he also painted landscapes and still life with the same recognisable dots and line work. And was inspired by other artists too as he mimicked the styles of Pablo Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian.

Whamm is part of Tate Moderns collection so you can go and see it anytime, although they do move things around so probably worth checking it’s on display before heading off to avoid disappointment if this work is on your must see list. Roy Lichtenstein’s work came to prominence in the 1960’s, has come to auction multiple times over the last 3 decades and the record price for a piece of Lichtenstein’s work at auction is 95,365,000 USD for Nurse, sold at Christie's New York in 2015.

He died in 1997 aged 73 in his beloved New York City. His widow Dorothy an American Philanthropist passed away in 2024 aged 84 after serving as the President of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and dedicating her life after his death to preserving her husband’s legacy. There are approximately 4500 recognised works worldwide, many of which are now owned by Whitney Museum of American Art. Hopeless, my other print is housed at, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! at Tate Modern: Pop Art Icon Explained

Roy Lichtenstein’s name is synonymous with Pop Art’s audacious, high-contrast raid on mass culture. Born in New York in 1923 and active across five decades, he translated the vernacular of comics, advertising and industrial printing into the cool, monumental language of museum painting. Among the most recognisable of his works is Whaam! (1963), the print I purchased, in reality a two-panel depiction of mid-air combat that has become a centrepiece of Tate Modern’s collection and a touchstone for how we understand Pop’s blend of wit, critique and technical precision that spans over 4 metres.

From New York to Pop

Lichtenstein studied at Ohio State University and served in the US Army during the Second World War, experiences that shaped both his sensibility and his disciplined working methods. In the 1950s he gravitated through styles—American Scene painting, then a strain of abstraction inflected by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism—before a decisive shift around 1961. With works like Look Mickey and Girl with Ball, he began reworking comic strips and adverts, not as throwaway jokes but as rigorous compositions. His signature devices—hand-painted Ben-Day dots, heavy black outlines, flat zones of primary colour, cropped frames and speech bubbles—arrived fully formed, pitched between pastiche and phenomenally sharp design.

Whaam!: a comic-book explosion at mural scale

Painted in 1963, Whaam! is among the first and most ambitious of Lichtenstein’s comic-derived canvases. Across two panels measuring roughly 172.7 cm by 406.4 cm in total, a sleek American fighter jet fires a rocket that slices across the yellow sky. On the right, an enemy plane erupts in a stylised blast, punctuated by a blazing “WHAAM!” in red capitals. A speech bubble delivers the laconic line: “I pressed the fire control… and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky…”

Lichtenstein based the composition on a panel drawn by Irv Novick for DC Comics’ All-American Men of War (1962), a series then popular with teenage readers. Yet what he produced is no mere enlargement. He cropped, simplified and recalibrated the scene’s dynamics, redesigning the vectors of force and the balance of colour so that the energy reads at a glance, even from across a large room. The result is both faithful to the source and distinctly Lichtenstein: the drama is amplified, the emotion cooled, the printing language turned into painting.

Technique: mechanical finish, human control

The “mechanical” look of Lichtenstein’s canvases was painstakingly handmade. He typically began by projecting a source image onto canvas, tracing and re-drawing to refine contours and composition. Areas of colour were masked and painted with remarkable flatness; dots were applied via stencils to emulate the Ben-Day screens used in mid-century commercial printing. In Whaam! the dots modulate tone in the sky and the planes’ fuselages, giving the eye a field to graze while keeping surface incident to a minimum. This suppression of the brushstroke—an overt refusal of Abstract Expressionism’s emotive flourish—was central to his project. The painting’s “machine” is a fiction, but it is a disciplined, persuasive one.

Violence, irony and the 1960s

Whaam! embodies a paradox: a picture of violent destruction rendered with immaculate detachment. When it debuted, viewers read it through the lens of the Cold War and the escalating conflict in South-East Asia. Some critics accused Lichtenstein of glamorising warfare; others saw a critique of a culture that packages heroism and mayhem for easy consumption. Lichtenstein himself was more circumspect, insisting his interest lay in formal language—how a mass image is constructed and how it can be transformed—rather than in the politics of the scene. Still, the work’s ambiguity is part of its lasting power. It leaves space for viewers to interrogate their own appetite for spectacle.

Appropriation and authorship

Lichtenstein’s reliance on comic sources has long stirred debate. The artists whose panels he reworked—often uncredited illustrators working under tight deadlines—rarely received acknowledgement at the time. This has prompted overdue attention to the craft of mid-century comics and to questions of artistic authorship. Lichtenstein did not copy; he redesigned. But his success, and the relative anonymity of his sources, pose ethical and historical questions we continue to ask of appropriation art. Whaam! sits at the centre of that conversation, a landmark of Pop that also exposes the power dynamics of culture-making.

From New York to London: Whaam! at Tate

The Tate acquired Whaam! in 1966 with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery, a bold move that signalled Britain’s serious engagement with Pop Art as it unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. Its arrival in London coincided with a flourishing of British Pop—from Richard Hamilton to Pauline Boty and Peter Blake—artists similarly interrogating media, consumerism and post-war imagery. Installed at Tate Modern today, Whaam! regularly draws crowds. Seen at its true scale, the work’s conceptual gambit becomes visceral: a flimsy comic panel transformed into a grand, 4‑metre-wide history painting for the jet age.

Stand before it and the composition clarifies itself. The left canvas carries the “cause”: the pilot, the missile’s trajectory, the propulsive diagonals. The right canvas is the “effect”: the blaze, the typographic boom, the enemy plane’s disintegrating geometry. The seam between the two panels is part of the rhythm, a pause between beats that heightens the snap of impact. And then there are the dots—so often reproduced at postcard size—that surprise with their scale, spacing and slight irregularity. Lichtenstein’s coolness is never cold; it is a choreography of attention.

Beyond comics: a modernist among moderns

Lichtenstein is sometimes pigeonholed as the comic-book painter, but his practice was broader and more historically alert. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he produced series that riffed on the brushstroke, on mirrors and reflections, on Art Deco and German Expressionism, and on the very grammar of painting. He reinterpreted Monet’s haystacks and cathedrals as fields of dots and stripes, translated Picasso and Matisse through his graphic idiom, and later explored Chinese landscapes in a serene, synthetic manner. Across these bodies of work he remained a modernist formalist at heart, testing how images are built, how signs acquire feeling, and how a painting can be both an object and a commentary on looking.

Legacy and influence

By the time of his death in 1997, Lichtenstein had reshaped the possibilities of painting. He expanded the canvas’s subject matter to embrace the low and the mass-produced without relinquishing rigour. Designers, advertisers and painters alike have mined his clarity of line and his command of visual punch. At the same time, artists engaged with appropriation, from the Pictures Generation to contemporary remix culture, owe something to his strategic borrowing and his insistence that context changes meaning.

Why Whaam! still matters and not just to me.

In an age saturated with images, Whaam! remains uncannily current. It is a case study in how a picture can be at once seductive and critical, immediate and reflective. Its subject is not only an aerial dogfight but also the speed at which images become clichés and the ease with which spectacle can eclipse consequence. That Lichtenstein can summon these complexities with a handful of colours, a few perfectly weighted lines and an onomatopoeic blast is testament to his acuity.

For London audiences, Whaam! offers more than a transatlantic import; it is a mirror held up to the shared visual culture of the post-war West—its bravado, its anxieties and its appetite for the new. Encountered at Tate Modern, it confirms Roy Lichtenstein as a modern art icon and Pop Art’s most eloquent advocate for the strange poetry of the mass-produced image.