Roy Lichtenstein, was a prominent American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible".
He began teaching at Rutgers University in 1960 where he was heavily influenced by Allan Kaprow, also a tutor at the University.His first work to feature the large scale use of hard edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery, Washington DC). In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers or cartoons. In 1961Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Finally making enough money to live from his painting, he stopped teaching a year later
