Roy Lichtenstein (New York, New York, 1923 – New York, New York, 1997) became a defining figure of Pop art by borrowing the vocabulary of commercial printing, the Ben-Day dot, the primary-color palette, the thick black outline, and using it to ask what counted as high art in an image-saturated age.

Lichtenstein studied under Hoyt L. Sherman at Ohio State University, whose experiments in rapid visual perception shaped his interest in images that register instantly and completely. His 1961 breakthrough, Look Mickey, rendered a comic-strip Donald Duck with the flat precision of newsprint; the following year his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery sold out before it opened, and Lichtenstein turned to the war and romance comics that produced Whaam! and Drowning Girl (both 1963). Each was appropriated from a specific published panel, but never simply enlarged: Lichtenstein cropped for maximum tension, recomposed weak drawing into taut geometry, and shifted color and dialogue until the source became, in his hands, something distinctly his own, a transformation he insisted on against persistent accusations of plagiarism.

That same tension between mechanical surface and emotional content runs through his later work. The Brushstroke paintings of the mid-1960s rendered the gestural mark, Abstract Expressionism's symbol of authentic feeling, as a hard-edged, mass-produced icon; conversely, his war and romance images used Ben-Day dots and flat color to render weeping, explosions, and declarations of love with the same cool detachment as an advertisement, letting maximal feeling and minimal affect occupy the same picture at once. He carried this vocabulary further still into sculpture and mirrored surfaces, and applied it to art history itself, reworking Monet's Rouen Cathedral, Cubist still lifes, and the studio interiors of Matisse in his own dotted line.

Lichtenstein's enduring legacy lies in that double move: collapsing the distance between commercial reproduction and painterly ambition, and permanently changing what either could mean. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Art Institute of Chicago.