Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was a leading American pop artist. He began by painting cowboy and Indian subjects, was influenced by Abstract Impressionism and by 1961 achieved a breakthrough with his enlarged dot images. His usually large pictures are based on the magnification of details from advertisements of everyday objects – a foot on a pedal-bin, a hand holding a sponge, a cooker with food in the open oven, and strip-cartoons. His technique imitates the coarse screen process of cheap newspaper printing, and his stylized forms translate his commonplace sources into simple but powerful patterns, expressed in strong primary colours, or in black and white. It is curiously ambivalent art, hovering between imitation and pastiche, in an oddly abstract way of dissociating recognizable objects from their surroundings and subjects from their significance. Some of his imaginary is sub-Picasso in origin, and he has also experimented with curiously dazzling effects of coloured plastics, and brass and enameled metal sculpture. There are works in Amsterdam, Chicago, Cologne, Detroit, London (Tate) and New York (MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney). (ref. Dictionary of Arts & Artists by P. & L. Murray).

Posters by Roy Lichtenstein