Roy Lichtenstein's early prints from the 1960s bring together some of his most recognisable imagery and set the tone for what he would spend the rest of his career known and admired for, translating comic-strip panels into the Ben-Day dots, flat colour and bold outlines that became his signature. Crying Girl, from 1963, began life as something almost throwaway: an offset lithograph printed as the invitation to Lichtenstein's second solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, folded in four and mailed out to announce the exhibition. Lichtenstein kept a small number of unfolded copies back and signed them himself, and what started as ephemera for a gallery mailing list has since become one of the most sought-after images of his entire early career.
By 1965, Lichtenstein was working on something far more deliberate. Sweet Dreams Baby!, the print he himself later called his first genuinely "true" Pop print, was made for 11 Pop Artists, a three-volume portfolio bringing together eleven artists working in the new movement, produced specifically to travel to European galleries and build international recognition for what had, until then, been seen as a largely American phenomenon. Nicknamed the "Pow print" for its comic-book punch overlaid with a single exploded word, it distilled everything Lichtenstein had been developing since Look Mickey in 1961, the hand-painted Ben-Day dots, the flat colour, the borrowed comic-strip drama, into a single, confident image built specifically for a print edition rather than adapted from a painting after the fact.
Across the prints from this period, Lichtenstein was drawing directly on the language of romance and war comics, blowing up single frames and isolated gestures into images built entirely from mass-market printing conventions rather than any personal painterly technique. This is the period before Gemini G.E.L. and the more technically elaborate print projects of his later decades, when Lichtenstein was still using the same commercial printing houses and small publishers that any advertiser of the era might have used, which gives these earliest prints a rawness and directness that his more polished later prints sometimes trade away.
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