One of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Roy Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate. Mining material from advertisements, comics, and the everyday, Lichtenstein brought what was then a great taboo, commercial art, into the gallery. He stressed the artificiality of his images by painting them as though they’d come from a commercial press, with the flat, single-color Ben-Day dots of the newspaper meticulously rendered by hand using paint and stencils. Later in his career, Lichtenstein extended his source material to art history, including the work of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, and experimented with three-dimensional works.