8 Roy Lichtenstein Works that Explain Why the Pop Artist Is So Influential

When Roy Lichtenstein ’s paintings of comic-book characters and glamorous women first appeared in New York galleries in the early 1960s, they challenged some of the most basic assumptions about what painting should be. Instead of the era’s popular gestural abstraction associated with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning , Lichtenstein offered crisp outlines, primary colors, speech bubbles, and enlarged dots that mimicked the printing processes of comics and advertisements (known as benday dots). His images looked mechanical, but they were painstakingly made by hand.