Roy Lichtenstein

Enlarge the face of the crying woman and the printing dots appear. Lichtenstein painted those dots one at a time, by hand — a person imitating the trace of a machine. He blew a single comic panel up to canvas scale and kept the speech balloon and the heavy black contour. He was accused of vulgarity, but the work turned the grammar of mass printing into a problem for painting. Late on he reworked Monet's cathedrals and Matisse's interiors the same way, showing that art history too is consumed as printed image. He died in New York in 1997.