Roy Lichtenstein, Water Lilies

While Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his comic book appropriations, his late-career turn to Impressionism produced some of the most technically ambitious prints of his career. In 1992, Lichtenstein took on one of Monet's most recognisable subjects, translating the dissolving light and colour of the Giverny waterlilies into hard-edged Pop through screenprinted enamel on swirled stainless steel.

In this video, MyArtBroker's Louisa Earl explores how Lichtenstein rebuilt Monet's Impressionism through his own comic book vocabulary. Rather than softening into colour and light as Monet's originals had, works like Water Lilies with Japanese Bridge and Water Lily Pond with Reflections restore the same imagery to crisp, constructed form, with lily pads reduced to flat graphic shapes and ripples turned into stripes and Ben-Day dots. Lichtenstein described the process as an industrial way of making Impressionism by a machine-like technique, and the reflective steel ground makes that mechanical remaking literal, changing with the light and the viewer in front of it.

Drawing on his lifelong interest in the distance between an image and its source, the Water Lilies series shows Lichtenstein turning from comic strips to art history itself, making the case that even the most revered images survive by being remade.