NARRATOR:

Roy Lichtenstein is famous for using Benday dots— the tiny dots of color that make up images in commercial printing and newspapers. Like other Pop artists, Lichtenstein brought commercial images into a fine art context. He used Benday dots to imitate comic strips and later, modern art classics. Roy Lichtenstein.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN:

The cartoon form means a couple of things to me. It means a sort of data— a minimal way of presenting information, through dots. You know, it has to do just with modern ideas or something. Then it means that it’s ersatz. It’s fake. Whatever I’m producing— if it’s a Picasso, or a brush stroke— it’s a fake one, because it’s a cartoon of it. Then it’s a modern, industrialized texture— the dots against the clear, against the unmodulated areas of the painting.

NARRATOR:

Lichtenstein was also famous for paintings based on comic books. To make them, he transferred comics to canvas with a projector and simplified them. People didn’t get it at first, as Lichtenstein said.

LICHTENSTEIN:

It took three months or so for people to realize that I was doing paintings, and they weren’t really the same as the cartoons. It wasn’t exactly the same thing.