Whaam! Varoom! R-rrring-g! The canvases of painter Roy Lichtenstein look as if they're lifted from the pages of comic books. Comics were a big inspiration for this pop artist, who was rich and famous when died in 1997 at age 73. But at a major Lichtenstein retrospective at Washington's National Gallery of Art, you can see that the artist found inspiration beyond comic books; he also paid his respects to the masters — Picasso, Monet and more.
Lichtenstein's 1960s works were comic-inspired — they're angsty frames, often featuring ladies in distress. In one iconic image, a beautiful, fraught woman with a furrowed brow grasps a telephone in both hands as she says "Ohh ... Alright ..." You just know she's talking to a fellow.
"What I like about it is the way she's holding the phone," says National Gallery curator Harry Cooper. "She's caressing the phone, and I think in a way she would rather have a relationship with the receiver than with whoever is on the other end of the line.