📍Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, NY 10024, USA
1923 – 1940“I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of a successful real estate broker, Milton, and Beatrice, a homemaker who had trained as a pianist. My sister Renée and I were taken to museums, concerts and the theatre, and the city's culture was all around us. It was a comfortable, middle-class Jewish household, and my parents expected us to do well at school, which I did, though art was not on the official curriculum. I loved science, radio and model aeroplanes, and I drew constantly. I played clarinet and piano, and in high school I formed a jazz band; as a teenager I went uptown to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to hear the great jazz musicians, and I painted portraits of them. I attended the Franklin School for Boys, a private school on the Upper West Side, and took weekend and summer classes at Parsons, and as a teenager I studied at the Art Students League with the painter Reginald Marsh, who painted the crowds and energy of New York streets and Coney Island. In 1940 I left New York for Ohio State University to study art, and after service in the Second World War, I taught for many years. In 1961, looking at a Mickey Mouse comic with my son, I painted my first cartoon-style picture, and with Look Mickey and the comic-strip paintings that followed, I became a founder of Pop Art. The comics, advertisements and newspaper printing dots of the New York of my youth became the language of my art, and I later returned to live and work in Manhattan.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today