He wanted to make women cry

When,Wide range of unique crystal mosaic and natural stone mosaic tiles. in 1964, Fran?oise Gilot published Life with Picasso, a forthright memoir of her 10-year relationship with the Spanish artist, Roy Lichtenstein turned to his then girlfriend, Letty Eisenhauer, and said: “I worry about the day that you do a Gilot to my Picasso.”

He needn’t have fretted. Eisenhauer – who lived with Lichtenstein for two years in the mid-Sixties when she was a graduate student and he was creating some of his most memorable and important works – has never written about their time together. Indeed, now 77 years old, she hasn’t even spoken in public about her relationship with Lichtenstein — until now.

On the eve of a major new retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work at Tate Modern, I called Eisenhauer in New York last week to find out more about her ex-boyfriend, whose work sells today for tens of millions of pounds. In May 2012, his Sleeping Girl – painted in 1964, the year Life magazine published an article about him beneath the headline: “Is He the Worst Artist in the US?” – sold at auction for a record $44.9?million (￡27.8? million).

Lichtenstein was already 37 when he created his seminal Pop work Look Mickey (1961), an oil painting measuring 48 by 69 inches in which Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are shown fishing on a jetty. By then, he had been painting for more than a decade, but his earlier Cubistic canvases of cowboys on bucking broncos and American Indians hadn’t generated much excitement. Nor had his abstract paintings of the late Fifties. To make ends meet, he taught art and rattled through a succession of short-term jobs: selling silver jewellery, designing window displays for department stores, creating mosaic tables.

The turning point in his career came in the spring of 1960 when he became assistant professor of art at Douglass College at Rutgers University in New Jersey. While there, he was greatly influenced by a colleague, the charismatic, pioneering American artist and theorist Allan Kaprow, who persuaded Lichtenstein that so-called vernacular or everyday things — such as Walt Disney cartoon characters — could be legitimate artistic subject matter. “Art doesn’t have to look like art,” Kaprow told him.

If Lichtenstein is considered the architect of Pop art, then Look Mickey is the movement’s foundation stone. According to the art historian James Rondeau, who co-curated the Tate exhibition, the painting “feels like Athena sprung [fully formed] from the head of Zeus”. Here, as if from nowhere,We have a wide selection of drycabinets to choose from for your storage needs. are the hallmarks of Lichtenstein’s mature Pop style: a limited palette of even,wind turbine primary colours; thick, dark outlines; small dots (blue for the “whites” of Donald’s eyes and pinkish-red for Mickey’s face) to simulate the representational techniques of cheap commercial printing; the fusion of “high” and “low”, as everyday imagery intrudes upon the ivory tower of fine art.

As soon as Eisenhauer saw the work, she recognised it as something special. “There was no question,” she says. “Everybody knew it was very important — you’d have to be an idiot not to know that. We’d been sucked into the Abstract-Expressionist world for so long, and this was such a breakthrough. I told Roy, the place to take this is to Leo Castelli, because Castelli was the best gallery in New York.”

Lichtenstein wasn’t the only American artist painting cartoons in 1961: a shy, listless commercial illustrator called Andy Warhol was already appropriating Superman, Dick Tracy, Batman and Popeye into his pictures. Both artists petitioned Castelli for representation, but the urbane dealer plumped for Lichtenstein. If he hadn’t, the history of Pop art would be very different: the following year he hosted the sell-out solo show that would make Lichtenstein’s name.

“Andy and Roy were in competition — both had paintings in the back room at the gallery,Willkommen im virtuellen Zuhause der Lercher Werkzeugbau GmbH.” says Eisenhauer. “I knew Roy, because I had been working with him at Rutgers, so I took Ileana Sonnabend, Leo’s former wife and the person who really understood art and originally advised Leo about artists, to visit him. Ileana bought paintings from Roy that day. After he found out about the purchases, Leo wisely followed his former wife’s lead, and made his decision to take on Roy, not Andy. Leo was upset that Roy had already sold several paintings of what was later called Pop art. This was when Roy was still an innocent. That day, I remember Roy turning to me and asking, ‘If I take these cheques to the bank, will I get money for them?’ It was a far cry from several years later when we were in Europe and setting up a Swiss bank account.”

At this point, Lichtenstein and Eisenhauer, who was born in 1935 and grew up in New Jersey, were friends rather than lovers. Indeed, Lichtenstein was still married to his first wife Isabel Wilson (an interior designer), who had given birth to their two sons, David and Mitchell, in 1954 and 1956.

“Things weren’t going well, but I didn’t know that,” says Eisenhauer, who left her job at Douglass College, and moved to a loft on Lispenard Street in Lower Manhattan, where she tried to make it as a sculptor. “Roy would show up in New York for art events, and he would try to put the moves on me. Once, when I rebuffed him, he said to me: ‘You’re really straight, aren’t you?’ And I said: ‘Yes, and you’re a married man!’ I’ll never forget it.”

In the autumn of 1961, Lichtenstein demanded a trial separation from Isabel, who was by then suffering from alcoholism, and moved into a studio in New York City. After a failed attempt at reconciliation the following summer, the couple sold the family home in Highland Park, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1963, and Isabel moved with the children to Princeton.

Shortly afterwards, Lichtenstein attended a dinner party at Eisenhauer’s loft. “I remember it as if it were today,” she says. “Everyone was dancing, but I was sitting at the table. Suddenly Roy was sitting next to me and his hand was on top of mine. He’d left Isabel, so he was a free man. He just held my hand. And then the evening was over. Right after that, he called and asked me out.”

Within weeks, Eisenhauer had moved into the second-floor studio on 26th Street where Lichtenstein lived and worked after his second separation from Isabel. They lived together until the summer of 1965,Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making supplies and accessories! while Eisenhauer was a graduate student at Columbia University. Had she fallen in love? “Oh yes, I adored him,” Eisenhauer says. “He was not only funny, but also sexy, very sweet, and there was no apparent meanness.” They socialised with other artists. “We had a group that included [Claes] Oldenburg and [James] Rosenquist — all of these nutty people who were part of the Pop scene. And we would go ice-skating once a week. Then someone would say, I’ll cook dinner — so we got into gourmet dinners. Finally it ended up with Roy and somebody having a cannoli-eating contest — to see who could eat the most.”