Roy Lichtenstein was an innovative twentieth-century painter, printmaker, and sculptor who facilitated the pop art movement. His fully achieved, imaginative paintings originated from comic strips and cartoons that imitated the newspaper printing process. Lichtenstein decorated each figure with his trademark Benday dots—a minute patterning from commercial engraving—to create texture and color gradations in his works. The artist “gravitated towards what he would characterize as the ‘dumbest’ or ‘worst’ visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it.” Hence, the “paraphrasing of despised images became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art.”
Source: Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
