Roy Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan (New York, USA) in 1923.
In the 1960s, became a leading figure of the new Pop Art movement. Inspired by advertisements and comic strips, Lichtenstein's bright, graphic works parodied American popular culture and the art world itself.
When American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey in 1961, it set the tone for his career. This primary-color portrait of the cartoon mouse introduced Lichtenstein's detached and deadpan style at a time when introspective Abstract Expressionism reigned. Mining material from advertisements, comics, and the everyday, Lichtenstein brought what was then a great taboo-commercial art-into the gallery. He stressed the artificiality of his images by painting them as though they'd come from a commercial press, with the flat, single-color Ben-Day dots of the newspaper meticulously rendered by hand using paint and stencils. Later in his career, Lichtenstein extended his source material to art history, including the work of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, and experimented with three-dimensional works. Lichtenstein's use of appropriated imagery has influenced artists such as Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Raymond Pettibon.
By the late 1960s, Lichtenstein had stopped using comic book sources. In the 1970s his focus turned to create paintings that referred to the art of early 20th-century masters like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Salvador Dalí. In the 1980s and '90s, he also painted representations of modern house interiors, brushstrokes and mirror reflections, all in his trademark, cartoon-like style. He also began working in sculpture.
In the 1980s, Lichtenstein received several major large-scale commissions, including a 25-foot-high sculpture titled "Brushstrokes in Flight" for the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio and a five-story-tall mural for the lobby of the Equitable Tower in New York.
Lichtenstein was committed to his art until the end of his life in 1997, often spending at least 10 hours a day in his studio. His work was acquired by major museum collections around the world, and he received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1995.