American, b. 1923, NY, NY — d. 1997, NY, NY
Lived and worked in New York, Southhampton and Captiva Island, Florida

Roy Lichtenstein, a key figure in the Pop art movement of the 1960s and beyond, grounded his profoundly inventive career beginnings by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles and art history itself. 

Noted for his use of deadpan humor, Lichtenstein used a rigorously manual process of perforated templates to replicate and often exaggerate the dot patterning commonly used in printing imagery. Known as Ben-Day dots, this patterning became a signature element of his style, which incorporated the look of mechanical reproduction into the fine-art world of painting. His image transformations typically included reducing the color palette to saturated primaries, eliminating incidental details, heightening contrasts, and emphasizing the pictorial clichés and graphic codes of commercially printed imagery.

Lichtenstein moved from those clichés of commercial print culture to the aesthetic clichés of high art. Parodying the autographic mark-making style of Abstract Expressionism, he produced representations of cartoon-like brushstrokes in both flat and sculptural artworks. Art history proved an enduringly rich field for Lichtenstein’s transformations with riffs on the styles of artists such as famous landscape Impressionist Claude Monet, early 20th century figurative Post-Impressionist Henri Matisse and Cubist Pablo Picasso.

Roy Lichtenstein 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, DC, and the Tate Modern in London. His works are collected internationally by both museums and individuals.