Agony and ecstasy fuse into one melodramatic guilty pleasure in Roy Lichtenstein’s “Kiss V, 1964.” Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997), a Pop artist steeped in Americana, initially painted semi-abstract scenes of the Old West before he began exclusively painting comic strip scenes and cropping images from advertisements. Influenced by artists who experimented with artwork based on everyday life, Lichtenstein’s work includes stylized landscapes, product packaging and parodies of Abstract Expressionists’ style, all exposing the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface.

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