Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-19997) used comic-book imagery in his art to critique mass market imagery. In 1961, while teaching at Rutgers University, Lichtenstein began to make paintings based on panels from war and romance comic books. In these, the source images are tightened and clarified to focus on significant emotions or actions that simultaneously represent and parody the flat, superficial ways in which a comic book communicates with its readers. Lichtenstein painted these images with heavy black outlines and flat primary colors, imitating the Benday dots used in the commercial printing of cartoons. Hopeless compresses an entire generic romance story into a single frame In so doing, Lichtenstein suggests something of the superficiality of the media-saturated culture of the early 1960s.^[1]