Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein achieved prominence through his innovative use of cartoon and comic book imagery in large-scale paintings and sculpture. Like fellow artist Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein began his career as a commercial artist. This experience influenced his later paintings, prints, and sculptures, which drew on images from pop culture, such as comics and advertisements.

Roy Lichtenstein in Focus gathered five of Lichtenstein’s early artworks from the 1960s to the early 1970s, bringing important loans together with works from the Crystal Bridges collection. Seen together, the works also revealed an artist breaking down traditional barriers between high art and mass media, a defining characteristic of Pop art.