At the Top of Pop

The Beatles, Vietnam, the pill and the assassinations. The ‘60s decade was a time of explosions, but none was louder than Pop Art. Roy Lichtenstein, who died Monday in New York at 73, was the master of a joyfully inventive band of artists who gave us an image of life in one of America’s more convulsive eras.

“He was not counterculture; he celebrated culture,” explained Stephanie Barron, vice president and senior curator of 20th century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where a Lichtenstein show was held in 1995.

Fans of comic books and newspaper comic strips recognized the artist’s distinctive style, a comics caricature with a dotted pattern overlaid. Lichtenstein found a certain wonderful craziness in the ‘60s, as did his contemporaries Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol.

Times art critic Christopher Knight, in his article Tuesday on Lichtenstein, recalled the artist after the Pop heyday “embarking first on a remarkable series of paintings of mirrors. Like Dracula and the undead, a viewer looks into the reflective surface of his mirrors but doesn’t see himself reflected there--except, perhaps, as a bright reflection of the processes of mass media.”

And that was precisely Lichtenstein’s point.