로이 릭턴스타인

In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein was a thirty-seven-year-old art teacher at Rutgers University with an unremarkable career in Abstract Expressionist painting behind him, when one of his sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic book and dared him to paint something that good. Lichtenstein took a single panel and blew it up to canvas size, reproducing the printer's dot pattern, the flat primary colors and the bold black outlines by hand, using a homemade stencil to fake the mechanical dots.

Two years later he painted Whaam!, a diptych lifted almost frame for frame from a 1962 war comic drawn by Irv Novick for DC's All-American Men of War, one fighter plane firing a rocket into another in a burst of red and yellow. It went on show at Leo Castelli's New York gallery in 1963 and crossed to London soon after, where the Tate bought it in 1966, the same museum that had spent the 1950s championing the Abstract Expressionism Lichtenstein had just abandoned.

Critics at the time accused him of simply copying, since the source images were real, uncredited comic-book panels. Lichtenstein kept working from comics, advertisements, and eventually reproductions of Cézanne and Picasso, for the next three decades, always redrawn by hand at a scale no printing press ever used. He died in New York in 1997, at 73.