NEW YORK, NY.- Dorothy Lichtenstein, a prominent arts patron and widow of the acclaimed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, died July 4 at her home in Southampton, New York. She was 84.
The cause was heart failure after a brief illness, according to Jack Cowart, the executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
An elegant and engaging woman who did not claim to have any artistic talent, Lichtenstein redefined the image of the “artist’s widow,” a relentlessly maligned art-world type. The widow “controls the entirety of her dead husband’s production,” as critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in Esquire magazine in 1965, and tends to conduct herself with a queenly arrogance.
Lichtenstein, by contrast, was described by friends as a gracious philanthropist who was loath to meddle or micromanage. Instead of seeking to sell the work left in her husband’s estate, she simply gave most of it away. Her donations consisted of paintings and sculptures, piles of sketchbooks, file drawers bulging with correspondence, and even the building in lower Manhattan in which Lichtenstein’s last studio was located.
Moreover, she did not want the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, of which she was co-founder and president, to continue in perpetuity. “We are working towards a sunset in 2026,” Cowart said.
It was through the foundation that the Lichtenstein family arranged to donate more than 1,000 works to museums in the United States and abroad. The main beneficiary was the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 2018 received a one-of-a-kind gift of some 400 works from Roy Lichtenstein’s personal study collection — a mix of classic pop paintings and sculptures and lesser-known material, like his early sketches of Native Americans and photographs that he took of New York building facades.
Asked if the foundation had anything left to give away, Cowart said there was still some artwork and roughly $40 million in cash.
The foundation probably achieved its finest moment in October, the centennial of Roy Lichtenstein’s birth. It published, after two decades of preparation, its magnum opus: a catalogue raisonne that provides crisp reproductions and detailed scholarship for each of the 5,500-plus works across different mediums that make up the artist’s total output. While catalogue raisonnes typically consist of a deluxe set of linen-covered books whose use requires a trip to an art library, the Lichtenstein version is online and anyone can consult it free of charge.
As a personality, Dorothy Lichtenstein was a charismatic woman who spoke in a throaty voice, laughed easily and had a warmth that complemented Roy Lichtenstein’s reticence. “Roy used to joke and say that I take care of the social and spiritual side of the family,” she once said.
Roy Lichtenstein, who died in 1997 at 73, took care of the ironic side, deriving much of his inspiration from newspaper advertisements and comic strips and elevating the inky traits of commercial printing — black outlines and Ben-Day dots — into a radical high-art style.
Dorothy Herzka was born Oct. 26, 1939, and grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in a cultured, civic-minded Jewish family. Her father, Lloyd Herzka, was a municipal judge who served on the Brooklyn Supreme Court; her mother, Thelma, ran the household. Dorothy, the youngest of three daughters, attended Beaver College (now Arcadia University), outside Philadelphia, where she majored in political science and pursued a minor in art history.
After graduation, she took a job at the Paul Bianchini Gallery on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. At a time when pop art was newly ascendant, the gallery scored a hit in 1964 with “American Supermarket,” a group exhibition of food-related art objects displayed as if in an A&P, complete with aisles and a checkout line. Viewers could purchase an original Lichtenstein (the price: $12) that consisted of a white paper shopping bag silk-screened with an image of an oven-ready turkey in a roasting pan.
“I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags,” Dorothy Lichtenstein recalled.
They married four years later, in 1968. Roy Lichtenstein was then a divorced father of two sons.
Dorothy Lichtenstein’s survivors include her stepsons David, a composer and musician, and Mitchell, a filmmaker and actor, as well as a nephew and three nieces.
In 1970, the Lichtensteins left their loft on the Lower East Side and settled in Southampton. There, Dorothy Lichtenstein found new projects to take on. She was the primary funder of the creative writing and film programs at Stony Brook Southampton, part of the State University of New York; she donated $5 million to the programs in 2018.
Friends said she had an insatiable thirst for learning. She took flying lessons, rode horses and co-wrote a cookbook about pasta.
“One day she decided she wanted to study calculus, and she went to Stony Brook to take a class,” said Frederic Tuten, a novelist and painter.
Her philanthropic support extended well beyond the foundation, encompassing everything from stem-cell research to animal rights.
“She was very interested in lemurs,” recalled Ruth Fine, the eminent art historian and board chair of the Lichtenstein Foundation. “Duke had a lemur study group, and she organized trips to go see the lemurs. She had also gone to Madagascar.”
Her husband, meanwhile, had seemed content to stay put in his various studios. In 1987, he purchased a handsome two-story building — a former factory with a red brick facade — at 741-5 Washington St. in the West Village. At 9,000 square feet, the interior was so capacious that the artist and his wife used it as their jogging track. Roy Lichtenstein worked and lived there his last decade, and after his death, Dorothy Lichtenstein moved the newly created Roy Lichtenstein Foundation into the building.
In 2022, Adam Weinberg, who was then the director of the Whitney Museum, mentioned to Dorothy Lichtenstein that the lease was running out on the office space rented by the museum for its prestigious Independent Study Program, which has educated generations of artists, curators and critics.
“When I told her about the ISP, it was sort of bingo,” Weinberg said.
Lichtenstein said her family would be happy to give the former studio building to the Whitney, which is just four blocks away. Last fall, she moved the foundation’s offices and archives out of the studio and into two smaller spaces — one in a town house next door, the other on West 20th Street — to make room and create a new home for the ISP.
With characteristic self-effacement, she declined the Whitney’s offer to rename it in her honor.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
