The Whitney Museum is going back to the beginning with Roy Lichtenstein. "Roy Lichtenstein: Like New," on view October 11, 2026 through May 10, 2027, gathers around 130 works — and its centerpiece is a reunion: eight paintings from the artist's 1962 debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the show that helped detonate Pop art, hang together again for the first time in decades. The checklist covers the canon: "Look Mickey," "Girl with Ball," "Drowning Girl," "Happy Tears," "Masterpiece" and "Mirror #1" (1969). "Girl with Ball," with its beach-ball blonde, is drawn from a Mount Airy Lodge advertisement — the commercial vernacular Lichtenstein made monumental, dots and all. Scale gets its due too. The exhibition recreates the 96-foot "Greene Street Mural," and "Girl in Window" steps outside the building entirely. The show is curated by Meg Onli alongside the artist Alex Da Corte, whose own maximalist practice makes him a sympathetic co-conspirator — a pairing that promises the installation will be as considered as the checklist. Six decades on, the question "Like New" poses is whether these images still shock — or whether familiarity is the point. Lichtenstein's ben-day dots are now the visual language of the culture he was quoting; seeing the 1962 works together is a reminder of how strange they must have seemed at first. The result is part survey, part homecoming — the dots back where the myth began. If the show succeeds, visitors will leave seeing the familiar images as strange again — which is exactly what they were in 1962. Da Corte's involvement is more than ceremonial — his maximalist installations share Lichtenstein's appetite for artifice, and his hand on the hang promises something more theatrical than a standard retrospective. The 1962 reunion is the draw, but the mural and the outdoor work are the reminder that Lichtenstein never stayed inside the frame for long.