World's Fair mural 1964

Roy Lichtenstein made this mural, sometime around the World's Fair, using his signature bold lines and Ben-Day dots. It's like he's handing us a comic book frame, blown up to a crazy scale. Look at how flat everything is, the red of her hair against that screaming yellow. He's not trying to trick us into thinking this is real; it's paint, pure and simple. It’s like a recipe made of colour and line. See how the black lines define the edges, making everything pop? Then there's the way he uses those dots to create shading, a trick he borrowed from commercial printing. But here, they become something else, a kind of texture, a visual buzz that makes the whole image vibrate. It reminds me of James Rosenquist, another Pop Art master who understood how to turn everyday images into something monumental and strange. But where Rosenquist is all about the collage, Lichtenstein keeps it clean, almost too perfect, in a way that's both seductive and unsettling.