HARRY COOPER:

“Look Mickey.” [laughs] It’s a shock. It’s a shocking painting.

NARRATOR:

When Roy Lichtenstein first showed this painting in 1961, some questioned whether he was the worst artist in America. The source for the image was a children’s book about two Disney cartoon figures. No one had done this before: elevated pop culture icons into “art” so blatantly.

HARRY COOPER:

It looks like some kind of print, some kind of cheap reproduction.

NARRATOR:

Lichtenstein is developing his signature technique here. Notice the little dots in Donald’s eyes and on Mickey’s face? Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art.

HARRY COOPER:

Those were Lichtenstein’s attempt to mimic the Benday dots of cheap commercial color reproduction. If you look closely at an image in a newspaper or on the comic pages, you’ll see that the colors and the black and white tones are created by this dot system.

NARRATOR:

Roy Lichtenstein explains why this was important to him.

ARCHIVAL, ROY LICHTENSTEIN:

What I’m interested in is examining printing processes, ways things are reproduced and disseminated, and the use of dots is one of the biggest ways things are printed. The simplicity—the magnifying of those dots is a way of getting you to see it more clearly.

HARRY COOPER:

We know that he took a dog grooming brush with stiff bristles, dipped it in paint and applied it to those areas to create dots. He then went onto develop much better ways of making the dots. But this is really where the dots got started. And in a lot of ways, it’s where Lichtenstein got started founding what we come to know as pop art.