Roy Lichtenstein: The Complete Story
Roy Lichtenstein was the American artist who turned the comic strip into fine art. He blew up panels of romance and war comics to mural size, copied their printing dots by hand, and made some of the defining images of Pop art, a crying blonde, a fighter jet firing, a thought bubble of doubt.
At first glance it looks like he simply copied cartoons. The interesting part is everything he changed, and why a painting of a comic frame counts as art at all.
Born: New York City, 1923
Known for: Pop art, Ben Day dots, comic panel paintings
Died: New York, 1997
Three that changed how I look
Three that changed how I look at a picture:
Six women, one monster, what Picasso did to the women who loved him
The darker truth about Gauguin, the part of the Tahiti story that never makes the wall label
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is actually on those scales
The dots
Cheap comics were printed with grids of small colored dots, called Ben Day dots, to fake shading and tone. Lichtenstein made those dots the whole point, painting them by hand or through stencils, huge and regular, so the machine look became the subject.
He kept the flat primary colors, the heavy black outlines and the speech bubbles. The result looks mass produced but is entirely handmade, which is the joke and the craft at once.
Whaam and the comics
His breakthrough came around 1961 with paintings lifted from war and romance comics. Whaam, a fighter plane blasting another from the sky, and Drowning Girl, a weeping woman who would rather sink than call her boyfriend, became Pop icons.
He chose melodrama on purpose, the most clichéd frames of love and combat, and froze them at monumental scale so the emotion turns strange and the cliché becomes the message.
Was it just copying?
Critics attacked him for stealing from comic artists, and the debate over credit to those original illustrators is real and ongoing. Lichtenstein argued he transformed the source, cropping, simplifying, recoloring and shifting it into a new language.
Whatever the verdict, he changed how art looked at mass media, treating advertising and comics as the true folk imagery of modern America.
Beyond the comics
He did far more than war and romance frames. He made dotted versions of famous paintings, brushstroke paintings that mock the macho drama of Abstract Expressionism, sculptures, and giant public murals.
The brushstroke series is his sly counterpunch, painting a single heroic swipe of paint, in flat dots, to deflate the whole idea of the passionate artist's gesture.
Quick answers about Roy Lichtenstein
What is Roy Lichtenstein famous for?
Comic strip paintings made of Ben Day dots, a cornerstone of Pop art. See what is Pop art.
Did he copy comics?
He based works on comic frames but cropped, recolored and transformed them. The credit debate continues.
What are Ben Day dots?
The small printing dots used to shade cheap comics, which he enlarged into his signature style.
Why he still matters
Lichtenstein made the throwaway image of the newsstand hang in museums, and forced a question that still stings, where does copying end and art begin. Start with what is Pop art.
One last number. In 2017 his painting Masterpiece, in which a cartoon woman predicts the hero will become famous, sold for 165 million dollars.