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FROM THE EDITORS

By Julie Coe, Editorial Director

Ronnie Heyman at home in Florida with Roy Lichtenstein’s “The Engagement Ring,” 1961, and Donald Judd’s “Untitled,” 1985, photographed by Lucas Oliver Mill in 2025. Donald Judd Art © 2025 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In 1969 Ronnie Heyman caught a major show on the New York School at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One work in particular caught her eye: Roy Lichtenstein’s “The Engagement Ring,” part of his comic-book series. Painted in the early sixties, it depicts a scene of unrequited love, in which a woman fears the object of her affection plans to propose to someone else. “It’s…it’s not an engagement ring. Is it?” she asks him tearfully. Heyman, on the other hand, was eventually reunited with the object of her affection: Lucas Oliver Mill tells how she ended up with the Lichtenstein in his latest Collector Walls column.

And we discover the Rolex Watchmaking Training Center, in Dallas, which is graduating the first class in its free 18-month program this winter. With this initiative, the Swiss brand welcomes a new generation of horologists into the fold.

COLLECTOR WALLS

By Lucas Oliver Mill

Roy Lichtenstein at Leo Castelli Gallery, photographed by Bill Ray in 1962. Photo: Carla de Benedetti, © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

One autumn afternoon in 1961, Ivan Karp, a director at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery, met with Roy Lichtenstein to see four new works the artist had created. These canvases, known as the “comic book paintings,” featured scenes and images that Lichtenstein pulled from comic strips and advertisements and blew up on a grand scale. The largest of the four shown to Karp was “The Engagement Ring.”
In the context of abstract expressionism’s dominance, these paintings must have seemed shockingly new when Karp first laid eyes on them. The encounter left a lasting impression: soon after, Lichtenstein began exhibiting with Castelli, which set him on the path to becoming one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.

GREATER GOOD

By Julie Coe

Photo: © Rolex

In Dallas, Texas, this winter, a new cohort of horologists will receive their diplomas as the first graduating class from the city’s Rolex Watchmaking Training Center. The students, who started the 18-month tuition-free course in 2024, will finish having learned the technical and theoretical aspects of the trade, with a focus on Rolex timepieces in particular. The final exam is taken at Geneva headquarters. The Swiss brand sees the Texas program as an investment in its future.

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THE GLOBAL AGENDA

Paul McCartney’s “George Harrison, Miami Beach, February 1964,” part of “Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto. © 1964 Paul McCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP

February 13. “Catherine Opie: The Pause That Dreams Against Erasure” opens at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany.
February 14. “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” opens at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
February 14. “Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris” opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
February 14. “Danh Vo” opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
February 17. “Hammershøi” opens at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
February 18. “Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm” opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
February 18. “Leonora Carrington” opens at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.
February 20. “Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance” opens at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels.

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