When Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of comic-book characters and glamorous women first appeared in New York galleries in the early 1960s, they challenged some of the most basic assumptions about what painting should be. Instead of the era’s popular gestural abstraction associated with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Lichtenstein offered crisp outlines, primary colors, speech bubbles, and enlarged dots that mimicked the printing processes of comics and advertisements (known as benday dots). His images looked mechanical, but they were painstakingly made by hand.
Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923 and began drawing and painting as a teenager, later studying at Ohio State University after taking classes with the artist Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League. After serving in the army during World War II, he returned to the U.S. to teach. His early work bore little resemblance to the Pop paintings that would make him famous: his first New York exhibition, in 1951, was rooted in the Abstract Expressionist idiom then dominating the city’s art scene.
By the late 1950s, however, Lichtenstein was experimenting with imagery drawn from popular culture. In 1961, he began making the comic- and advertisement-based paintings that established his signature style. The shift marked the beginning of a sustained investigation into how images are made, reproduced, and understood.
Today, Lichtenstein is regarded as one of the defining figures of Pop art, known for questioning what happens to an image when it is copied and transformed into something new—raising questions of authorship and perception.
These questions are at the center of “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective, the first in New York devoted to the artist since 1993. On view through May 10, 2027, the exhibition features roughly 130 works from the early 1940s through the 1990s, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and film. The exhibition is organized by Meg Onli, curator at the Whitney, as well as artist Alex Da Corte, and finds connections between one of the early masters of reproduction and today’s digital world. Here are eight works that reveal why Lichtenstein’s deceptively simple images remain so influential.
Girl with Ball, 1961
A quintessential image of carefree American leisure in which a young woman in a bathing suit holds a beach ball against a bright sky, Girl with Ball is based on an advertisement for the Mount Airy Lodge in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. The work illustrates Lichtenstein’s early interest in transforming subjects from advertisements into paintings.
The act of transformation is crucial. Lichtenstein was not copying an advertisement; he was turning a commercially produced image into a painting while making the mechanics of its reproduction conspicuous. He flattened colors, exaggerated outlines, eliminated details, and began using his signature benday dots.
The painting also marks a major turning point in Lichtenstein’s career. In 1961, he moved away from the Abstract Expressionist vocabulary that had shaped his earlier work and toward the commercial imagery that would make him famous. The transition gave him a new way to investigate painting: by making images that appeared impersonal or mass-produced while requiring considerable control and labor to create.
Look Mickey, 1961
Look Mickey, 1961
Roy Lichtenstein
Philadelphia Museum of Art
In addition to reimagining advertisements, Lichtenstein’s early foray into Pop art was defined by his interest in comic imagery. One of his best-known pieces, Look Mickey, features Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fishing from a dock, with Donald declaring, “Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” The joke is that Donald has actually hooked his own jacket.
Lichtenstein based the painting on an illustration from the 1960 children’s book Donald Duck: Lost and Found, simplifying the original composition and reducing its colors to a limited palette of primary hues and white. What made the painting startling in 1961 was not simply its subject. Lichtenstein treated cartoon imagery with the scale, seriousness, and materiality traditionally associated with fine-art painting. The characters were instantly familiar, but the context was entirely different.
Leo Castelli Gallery Handshake Poster, 1962
Hanging outside a freestanding gallery built within the museum is a poster from Lichtenstein’s first ever exhibition with Leo Castelli, the influential dealer who helped launch the careers of some of the most famous names in American Pop and Minimalist art. Featuring a handshake, the poster marks one of the most significant moments in the artist’s career. The show, which took place in early 1962, helped to establish the commercial legitimacy of his works despite their unconventional subjects and style.
In a standout moment in the show, the museum has recreated this pivotal exhibition, complete with a parquet floor.
Bringing the pieces from this show together again, the room in “Like New” offers viewers the chance to step back in time and imagine what it was like to see Lichtenstein’s works when they were first presented. Included in the display are images based on war comics, household products like a washing machine, and advertisements, subjects the artist would quickly become known for. Likewise, the historic hanging offers insight into Lichtenstein’s early adoption of the visual language he would soon master.
Drowning Girl, 1963
Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl has become widely recognizable as one of the artist’s most famous works. The piece features a woman floating in turbulent water, her eyes closed and her face set in an expression of melodramatic distress. A thought bubble reads, “I don’t care!”
Lichtenstein based the work on an image by comic-book illustrator Tony Abruzzo that appeared in DC Comics’ Secret Hearts in 1962, cropping the original composition and removing the woman’s boyfriend to concentrate attention on her isolated figure.
That process of cropping and editing is central to understanding the painting. Lichtenstein took an already manufactured image and manufactured it again. By enlarging the comic-book panel and transferring its visual language onto canvas, he transformed something designed for mass circulation into something that would hang in a museum.
By this point, Lichtenstein was one of the most visible young artists associated with Pop art. It was clear Pop art was growing, but it was seen as radical, even offensive. Lichtenstein and other Pop artists pushed forward despite negative criticism, continuing to depict popular culture and the consumerist tendencies of American life at a time when the U.S. was beginning to define itself as in opposition to Communism.
Hot Dog, 1964
In Hot Dog, Lichtenstein took an ordinary object of American life and transformed it into an unmistakably Pop image. He would come to depict an image of a hot dog often, including in color form, while the one on view in “Like New” is a black-and-white work on paper.
Lichtenstein’s interest in everyday objects was part of a larger Pop-art challenge to the idea that serious art should deal with elevated subjects. By giving the hot dog the scale and visual authority of a traditional, museum-worthy painting, Lichtenstein challenged the distinction between “high” and “low” culture.
The subject has acquired another layer of significance at the Whitney. Artist and exhibition co-curator Alex Da Corte has installed Hot Dog with Ketchup (2026), a billboard across from the museum, based on Lichtenstein’s painting. The intervention turns Lichtenstein’s Pop image back into something public-facing and commercial-looking, while also referencing the actual NYC food vendors outside the museum.
Little Big Painting, 1965
With Little Big Painting, Lichtenstein turned his attention from comic-book imagery to painting itself. The work depicts large, carefully rendered brushstrokes in red, yellow, white, and black, a motif he revisited often in his practice.
The target of the brushstroke pieces was the heroic gestural language of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant American art movement of the preceding generation. Artists like Pollock had made the physical act of painting central to their work, with drips, splashes, and sweeping marks serving as evidence of the artist’s individual presence. Lichtenstein took that supposedly spontaneous gesture and turned it into a reproducible graphic symbol.
Behind the large strokes in the work is a field of benday dots, associating the supposedly unique, expressive brushstroke with mass production.
Rouen Cathedral, Set III, 1968–69
Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral, Set III reimagines one of the canonical achievements of 19th-century painting: Claude Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral. Monet famously painted the cathedral repeatedly under changing conditions of light, producing some 30 versions in the 1890s. Lichtenstein turned their serial structure into his own Pop-art experiment.
While Monet used subtle shifts of color and brushwork to capture fleeting changes in atmosphere, Lichtenstein translated the cathedral into stark contrasts and enlarged benday dots across five canvases. This is one of the clearest instances of Lichtenstein borrowing from other artists—seen in several artworks on view at the Whitney that reference recognizable pieces from artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Comparing each of the five canvases, the Rouen Cathedral set also offers a remarkable case study in how Lichtenstein used dots and color. At close range, the dots look like discrete painted circles; from farther away, they merge into tones and colors, particularly noticeable on the canvases with dark-blue and light-yellow backgrounds. In this respect, Lichtenstein’s paintings form an interesting counterpoint to Monet’s. Both depend on the viewer’s perception to capture the same object, but using radically different means.
Mirror #1 (Oval 60” x 48”), 1969
In Lichtenstein’s famous “Mirror” series (1969–72), he portrayed a familiar object—a reflective surface—as something that isn’t reflective at all. The exhibition contains eight of these iconic works. In each, the mirror is represented through a circular or oval composition of colored bands and halftone dots. Seen well in Mirror #1, instead of giving viewers a literal reflection, Lichtenstein offers the graphic signs that tell us what a mirror is supposed to look like. Rendered in black-and-white dots, the composition contains depictions of a glare, as if reflecting light. Removing the mirror’s function, the object becomes an image of itself.
The work also complicates the assumption that Lichtenstein’s art was simply about copying mass media. Mirrors became another way for him to explore perception and illusion. His treatment of the reflective surface makes this simple object conspicuously artificial. Here, the viewer can see Lichtenstein not simply as the artist who turned comics into paintings, but as an artist preoccupied with what happens when images move from one context into another. These mirror works promise to show us reality while giving us only another constructed surface.
And that may be the key to seeing Lichtenstein “Like New,” as the exhibition title frames the works. His paintings are instantly recognizable because they look like things we have seen before. But the longer we look, the more complicated that recognition becomes.
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