Becoming Roy Lichtenstein: The Path to Pop

A landmark artist biography that takes us behind the Ben-Day dots and into the invention of Pop

When Roy Lichtenstein painted his breakthrough canvas Look Mickey in 1961—an image of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse adapted from a storybook belonging to his young sons—he was an obscure thirty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Rutgers who had labored for years on the periphery of the art world. Within a few years, Pop paintings like this one, in which he transformed the crude imagery and graph...