Sinking Sun (section)

A puffy white cloud takes center stage here, its edges traced in thick black outline and its body filled with a shimmer of red and blue dots. Behind it, beams of light fan out across the sky, while a curvy yellow ribbon and a stripe of red hint at the horizon below. This is a section of Roy Lichtenstein's "Sinking Sun," and every inch of it shows off the trick that made him famous. Those little colored dots, known as Ben-Day dots, came straight from the world of comic books and cheap newspaper printing, where images were built pixel by pixel long before computers existed.

Lichtenstein was a star of Pop Art in the 1960s, a movement that pulled ideas from advertising, cartoons, and everyday products rather than lofty subjects. Blowing up humble printing dots to a giant scale was his cheeky way of asking whether mass-produced imagery could count as serious art. A sunset would normally be painted with soft light and dreamy color, but he flattens the whole thing into crisp shapes and bold lines. The result trades romance for a graphic snap, poking gentle fun at both the classic landscape and the slick machinery of modern printing.