Roy Lichtenstein was active as a painter and graphic artist, and in the later stages of his career he also made sculptures. His paintings from the 1950s were in line with abstract expressionism. In the 1960s, his style changed and he made his first paintings using ‘Ben Day dots’. The dots in grids were based on a printing technique that was developed in around 1870 by Benjamin Henry Day Jr. An illusion of colour and shade was created using small coloured dots. We are familiar with this technique from comic strips and four-colour printing, for example. With his paintings, Lichtenstein made the ‘Ben Day dots’ his trademark and became a world-famous pop art icon. The enlarged motifs in his works are derived from art history, advertisements and cartoons. Lichtenstein did not intend his work to be a criticism of consumer society, but above all wanted to make us look at the world in a different way.
