Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 21, 2013

Look Mickey is a 1961 oil on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Based on an illustration showing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck during a fishing mishap, it is widely regarded as the bridge between his abstract expressionism and pop art works. It is notable for its ironic humor and aesthetic value as well as being the first example of the artist's employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and comic imagery as a source for a painting. Building on his late 1950s drawings of comic strips characters, Look Mickey marks Lichtenstein's first full employment of painterly techniques to reproduce almost faithful representations of pop culture and so satirize and comment upon the then developing process of mass production of visual imagery. In this, Lichtenstein pioneered a motif that became influential not only in 1960s Pop art but continuing to the work of artists today. The work dates from Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition, and is regarded by art critics as revolutionary both as a progression of pop art and as a work of modern art in general. It was later shown hanging prominently in Lichtenstein's studio in his 1973 painting, Artist's Studio—Look Mickey. (Full article...)

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