Nurse 1964

Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Nurse’ is a painting, and maybe even a bit of a send-up, of a comic book panel. It's all flat planes of color, sharp outlines, and those famous Ben-Day dots. He’s got this way of taking something mass-produced and making it… well, handmade again. Look at the yellow of her hair against that mustard background, it's almost a solid block, but then the stark black lines give it such graphic punch. You can almost smell the printing press. There’s something unsettling about how smoothly it’s all rendered. It feels less like paint and more like a slick surface, but that's the trick. Lichtenstein wanted to highlight how images circulate, get copied, and become our reality. It’s as if he’s asking: what’s real and what’s just another image? It reminds me of the way Elizabeth Murray would challenge the canvas, but with a completely different bag of tricks. He leaves us questioning the whole idea of originality in art.