Mira, Mickey

In 1961 the serious New York art world still belonged to abstraction, to drips and large fields of feeling. Roy Lichtenstein, then teaching in New Jersey, painted this instead: Donald Duck on a jetty, telling Mickey he has hooked a big one, when in fact he has snagged his own coat. He lifted the scene from a cheap children's book and copied its look by hand, even faking the dotted shading of commercial colour printing by dabbing paint through a stiff dog-grooming brush. The flat outlines, the speech balloon, the mechanical dots all appeared here for the first time in his work. By the time he died it was regarded as his breakthrough, and he left it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.