Lichtenstein took the most dismissed visual material of mid-twentieth-century American culture — the comic strip, the advertisement, the romance novel, the war picture — and remade it as fine art, in the process reshaping what American painting could include and what it could mean.
Lichtenstein came to art through a more conventional path than many of his Pop-Art contemporaries. His Manhattan childhood, his early studies at the Art Students League, and his subsequent undergraduate and graduate work in art placed him within the academic American art-teaching system of the postwar period. The decade he spent teaching at Ohio State and at the State University of New York Oswego before moving to Rutgers gave him a thorough grounding in the disciplines of academic painting and drawing.
The decisive moment of his early career was his exposure to the avant-garde of the late 1950s. His move to Rutgers placed him in the orbit of Allan Kaprow's Happenings and the broader downtown New York avant-garde, and his first comic-strip painting was the result. The work was unlike anything else he had produced, and it was unlike anything else then being made in American painting.
The first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery was a commercial and critical sensation; the entire show sold to major collectors before it opened to the public, and Lichtenstein's career was effectively launched overnight. Over the next several years he produced the sequence of comic-derived paintings — including the war pictures, the romance comics, and the single-panel close-ups — that would define his place in American Pop Art.
His mature career extended the comic-strip idiom in many directions. He painted his own versions of Cézanne, Picasso, Mondrian, and the Abstract Expressionists in the Ben-Day-dot vocabulary; he produced the Brushstroke paintings that turned the gestural mark of Abstract Expressionism into a parodic, hand-painted icon; and his Mirror, Entablature, and Reflections series explored the limits of his approach across the 1970s and 1980s. He also produced an extensive body of sculpture, prints, and public commissions, including the monumental Mural with Blue Brushstroke (1986) for the Equitable Center in New York and the Times Square Mural (designed 1990, installed 2002).
His position in twentieth-century American art is settled at the highest level. He is one of the small group of artists most closely identified with Pop Art and with the postwar reorientation of American painting away from Abstract Expressionism, and his work has continued to be widely exhibited, collected, and studied in the decades since his death.