The Whitney Museum of American Art is about to give Roy Lichtenstein the kind of homecoming New York has not seen in a generation. 'Roy Lichtenstein: Like New' opens to the public on 11 October 2026 at the museum's Gansevoort Street building and runs through 10 May 2027, the first major retrospective of the Pop artist in the city since the Guggenheim's 1993 survey. Some 130 works span six decades of Lichtenstein's career, from the comic-strip explosions that made his name to the late studio experiments few visitors will have seen. The show is organised by Meg Onli, the Whitney's Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, working with the artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator. Its centrepiece reunion brings together all eight paintings from Lichtenstein's 1962 Pop debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery, shown together for the first time since that landmark exhibition. Four murals have been re-created and hand-painted specially for the occasion, and the hang moves chronologically through the war-comics triptych 'As I Opened Fire' (1964), the still-life wall of the early 1970s, the first Pop painting 'Look Mickey' (1961), and 'Happy Tears' (1964) paired with Sturtevant's knowing copy. One of the most talked-about loans is 'Drowning Girl' (1963), the weeping blonde that launched a thousand dorm-room posters, arriving from the Museum of Modern Art. The curators' framing leans into a paradox: an artist famous for mechanical Ben-Day dots turns out, on close inspection, to have made emphatically handmade work, and the exhibition keeps returning to questions of copying, reframing and what authenticity means in an age of endless reproduction. At a press preview on 7 October, Whitney director Scott Rothkopf described the show as a once-in-a-generation event, and the title nods to the idea that there is always something new to find in Lichtenstein's cropping, cutting and reframing of imagery. For a museum that has spent recent years re-examining American art's canon, the retrospective is a major autumn anchor.