Roy Lichtenstein has been widely celebrated—and, at times, critiqued—for his Pop paintings since the early 1960s. His iconic images, painted in his distinctive painterly style of Ben-Day dots, are among the most familiar images of postwar American painting. His high-impact, graphic images blended the visual language of mechanical reproduction with drawing and painting by hand, inviting a provocative dialogue about his themes, subjects, and process. Inspired by comic book and advertising imagery and the methods of commercial printing, Lichtenstein’s work questions the role of artmaking in the age mechanical reproduction, and the familiarity and currency of images in popular culture.

Born in New York City, Lichtenstein (1923-1997) began creating drawings, sculptures, and visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York at an early age. After high school, he took art classes at the Art Students League of New York before enrolling at Ohio State University in 1940. Although his education was interrupted by three years of service in the Army, he returned to Ohio State after the war, where he received his BFA in 1946, MFA in 1949, and then began his teaching career.

In the 1950s, Lichtenstein began exhibiting his paintings—mostly based on themes of the American West and American folklore—in New York galleries. He continued painting figurative scenes until 1957, when he moved to the East Coast and began experimenting with Abstract Expressionism. By the late 1950s, Lichtenstein started combining images of comic strip figures with his abstract, painterly style, introducing the subjects that in the early 1960s would establish him as a leading Pop painter.

He painted his first overt cartoon work in 1961, Look Mickey, borrowing both the subject and flat, half-tone style and bright, primary colors from comic books. Arriving at his signature Pop style, he imitated the Ben-Day dot commercial printing process in his paintings, meticulously constructed his images out of dots painted through a handmade metal screen. Using this technique, he began making the classic Pop images for which he is well-known, painting enlarged images of advertisement illustrations and the dramatized images of comic strip scenes. When Lichtenstein exhibited these early Pop paintings with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, he achieved great commercial and critical success and established an international audience for his work. Through the success of his landmark one-man show, Lichtenstein was able to quit his teaching job and devote himself to painting full-time. He set up a studio in Manhattan, where he painted a series of dramatized romance and war subjects derived from comic books. He started using Magna, a quick drying acrylic paint that achieved a smooth, commercial finish.

In the fall of 1968, while visiting Los Angeles, Lichtenstein met with curator John Coplans. During the meeting, Coplans shared that he was putting on an exhibition called Serial Imagery and showed Lichtenstein reproductions of Claude Monet’s Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral paintings. Monet’s Haystacks series from 1890-91 depicts the effects of natural light on a field of haystacks throughout various times of the day and across seasons, therefore drawing attention to the fleeting, ephemeral qualities of light, weather, and atmosphere. But what fascinated Lichtenstein most about Monet’s work was the aspect of repetition.

In the late 1960s, Lichtenstein began a series of paintings and lithographs based on modern masterpieces, including Monet’s Haystacks and Picasso’s portraits, translating the compositions and painterly brushwork of these iconic works into his signature Ben Day dots. Lichtenstein’s crisp, stencil-like pictures that emulated the printing process formed a stark contrast with the unique painterly creations of his art historical predecessors. Treating modern masterpieces as he did his found comic book imagery, Lichtenstein suggests that both high art and popular art relied on visual codes. Upending the art historical norms that had dominated for centuries, these works invite a dialogue around uniqueness and reproduction, originals and copies, and high art versus mass culture—and replaces them with a new visual language of the 1960s.

In Haystacks (1968) and Haystacks (1969), as was typical of the artist, Lichtenstein reworked the source material (in this case Monet’s Haystacks) into his own language of variation in repetition. Each uses only two colors, as Lichtenstein manages to take a detailed Impressionist landscape and reduce it to its basic components of shape and shadow. The optical illusion in Lichtenstein’s paintings is constructed solely out of the placement and coloration of his handpainted dots, as the surface is pulled forward and simultaneously stretched back, reproducing the familiar compositions of Monet’s iconic Haystacks paintings in an aesthetic that was distinctly Lichtenstein’s. Turning Monet’s loose, painterly brushstrokes into Ben Day dots, the artist manages to make the subject feel mass-produced, although it is, in fact, hand painted using a combination of oil and Magna.

Describing how he chose his sources Lichtenstein stated, “Instead of using subject matter that was considered vernacular, or every day, I used subject matter that was celebrated as art.”

Works of art by Roy Lichtenstein are © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.