Roy Lichtenstein was an American artist known for his paintings and prints which referenced commercial art and popular culture icons like Mickey Mouse. Composed using Ben-Day dots (the method used by newspapers and comic strips to denote gradients and texture).

Lichtenstein’s work mimicked the mechanical technique with his own hand on a much larger scale. He was a leading figure in establishing the Pop Art movement, along with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. “I take a cliché and try to organize its forms to make it monumental.

Lichtenstein’s first one-man show, held in New York City in 1962, was a great commercial success, and his innovative work found an international audience. In 1966 he became the first American to exhibit at London’s Tate Gallery.

By the early 1960s, he had begun showing with Leo Castelli gallery in New York, and made major breakthroughs with works such as Drowning Girl (1963), a satirical take on melodramatic pulp fiction of the era. Themes of irony and cliché prevailed throughout the remainder of Lichtenstein’s career, as evinced in his Haystacks (1969), a take on the canonical series by Claude Monet. The artist died of pneumonia on September 29, 1997 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Modern in London.

Lichtenstein continued in this vein for much of his career, and his artworks are readily identifiable by their comic-strip characteristics. Nevertheless he extended these techniques into clever and thought-provoking meditations on art and popular culture. After the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s works began to include still life’s and landscapes, and they were a dramatic departure from his earlier style in their use of brushstrokes as well as in their subject matter.