Dorothy Lichtenstein (1939–2024)

Philanthropist Dorothy Lichtenstein, a cofounder and the president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, died July 4 at her home in Southampton, New York, of complications from congenital heart disease. She was eighty-four. In addition to her work with the foundation honoring her late Pop artist husband, Lichtenstein for twenty-four years served on the board of the Studio in a School, which was founded by fellow philanthropist Agnes Gund to provide New York City youth with professional arts education; she was a founding vice chair of the affiliated Studio Institute, which was created in 2016 to expand the school’s philanthropic mission beyond New York. As well, she sat on the board of Southampton’s Parrish Art Museum, which she joined in 2000, and on that of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation since 2011. “Dorothy was a powerful model of how to be in the world,” wrote her family in anobituary.“She was kind and deeply empathic, always doing ‘the next right thing’ and treating others with patience, love and tolerance.”

Dorothy Lichtenstein was born Dorothy Herzka in Brooklyn in 1939. After graduating from Midwood High School, she studied political science with a minor in art history at Pennsylvania’s all-girl Beaver College (“there were no end of jokes,” she toldGagosian Quarterlyin 2018; the school is now called Arcadia University). After returning to New York, she took a job at the Paul Bianchini Gallery in 1963, organizing exhibitions of Pop art. She met Lichtenstein in 1964 through the gallery’s group exhibition “The American Supermarket,” in which his work appeared alongside that of Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann. “He always said that when he walked into the gallery, he heard me speaking French on the telephone, and I had [a] broken leg in a cast, that somehow that combination really worked,” Dorothy told Gund in a 1998interviewfor New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Though Lichtenstein, divorced with two sons, had a girlfriend at the time, the pair reconnected following the dissolution of the relationship. They married in 1968 and two years later moved to Southampton.

After her husband died of pneumonia in 1997, Lichtenstein cofounded the Roy Lichtenstein Foudation, which was committed not only to preserving the artist’s legacy but to supporting art and education. Among the organizations the foundation assisted are local arts and education concerns, including the Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center, Guild Hall, LongHouse Reserve, the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center, and the Stony Brook Foundation, as well as arts organizations beyond Long Island’s East End, among them the nonprofit galleries Artists Space and Exit Art in New York. Lichtenstein additionally was the main benefactor of the Stony Brook Southampton Arts Program, which was recently renamed the Lichtenstein Center and encompasses several MFAs and a BFA, as well as minors and advanced training programs.

“She didn’t really relish putting her name on things,” Robert Reeves, who founded Stony Brook’s creative writing MFA, told27East.com. But Lichtenstein worried that the arts were under siege in the country, and “the strategy was that lending her name . . . could give us some clout.”

In 2017, Lichtenstein and Gund founded the Dorothy Lichtenstein ArtsReach Fund for art and social justice at the Parrish Museum. The fund to date has supported exhibitions by artists including Barthélémy Toguo, Tomashi Jackson, and Hank Willis Thomas.Lichtenstein around 2018 began unwinding the Lichtenstein Foundation, parceling out four hundred artworks to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which thanks to the gift now holds the world’s largest collection of the Pop artist’s work. The Whitney also gained more than five hundred photographs by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender (Shunk-Kender) documenting the actions and performances of artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra that took place at Pier 18 on the Hudson River, near the museum’s current home. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, meanwhile, received a trove of roughly a million documents and related materials.

Lichtenstein was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2001. “Her philanthropy and desire to help was boundless—she was a beacon of light and steadfast support,” wrote Gund in an onlinememorial. “The world is darker without Dorothy in it.”