Although Lichtenstein, then a thirty-eight-year-old assistant art professor at Rutgers University's Douglass College in New Jersey, was also making pictures based on comic-book prototypes--an example of wholly independent multiple discovery not unlike such scientific findings as calculus, oxygen, photography, and evolution--he and Warhol were in fact doing quite different things with similar source material, as the divergent tangents of their later careers would amply demonstrate. By 1964, Castelli recognized his mistake and added the thwarted aspirant to his gallery roster, though not before Warhol forswore cartoon imagery, fearful of seeming to imitate Lichtenstein, of whom he always remained somewhat in awe.
Click here to read Martin Filler's entire article at The New York Review.
