Roy Lichtenstein
Overview
 
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

ist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...

 in New York City and along with Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...

, James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...

 and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

. Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek
Tongue-in-cheek
Tongue-in-cheek is a phrase used as a figure of speech to imply that a statement or other production is humorously intended and it should not be taken at face value. The facial expression typically indicates that one is joking or making a mental effort. In the past, it may also have indicated...

 humorous manner.
Quotations

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I got the idea of doing really simple minded pictures that would look inept and kind of stupid and the colour would look as if it wasn't art.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

I think I am anti-experimental and anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting away from the tyranny of the rectangle, anti-movement and light, anti-mystery, anti-paint quality, anti-Zen and anti all of those brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everyone understands so thoroughly.

I want my images to be as critical, as threatening and as insistent as possible.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

It's not saying that commercial art is terrible or 'look what we've come to' — that may be a sociological fact but it's not what this art is about.

My work doesn't look like a painting ... it looks like the thing itself.

My work is about our American definition of images,and visual communication.

One would hardly look at my work and think it wasn't satirical, I think, or that it makes no social comment. I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any.

 
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