Pop Art

Forming in the late 1950s, Pop Art was primarily explored in the United Kingdom and the United States. It pulled from advertising, comic books and other sources of culture that had never been used much in art outside of some Dada work. It would display ordinary and mundane images to show off the banel nature of these things, often for ironic effect. The movement really caught attention all across the world and has connected the earlier 20th century art movements with modern art that ended the 20th century.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the leading Pop Artists in the 1960s when the style first came to prominence. His art established the use of parody in the Pop Art movement. He would use comic book frames and repurpose the images, bringing a high degree of accuracy to the image, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

I Can See the Whole Room...and There's Nobody in It! (1961)

Based on a Steve Roper cartoon, Roy Lichtenstein colorized the image, changed the speech box and did the painting four feet by four feet with graphite and oil. The picture teases the viewer, as if the subject of the painting can see the art gallery through the peephole.

Drowning Girl (1963)

Based on a 1962 DC Comic splash page by Tony Abruzzo, this piece is considered one of Roy Lichtenstein's most important works. The distraught woman in choppy water, laments how she doesn’t want to be saved. The waves call to mind the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.