After spending the first few years of the 1960s painting scenes from comic books, Roy Lichtenstein found himself enraptured by a new subject matter: landscapes. In 1964, the Pop artist created his first paintings of floating clouds, ocean tides, and rolling hills, drawing inspiration from the nature scenes often overlooked in the background of cartoon strips. Over the following decades, Lichtenstein continued to put his Pop art spin on landscape painting, choosing to portray scenes from nature that felt cliché or mass-produced. For example, his prints of ray-filled sunrises remind viewers of images found on travel postcards, while his versions of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings reference the mass-production of these art historical masterpieces. For the final series of his career, Lichtenstein expanded his parody of traditional landscapes with Landscapes in the Chinese Style (1995–97), transforming the ethereal and expressive ink-and-wash paintings from China’s Song dynasty into dotted, mechanical compositions that appear computer-generated.
