After the flash: Roy Lichtenstein and the women who remain

I have always been captivated by the women in Roy Lichtenstein’s work—such glamour, such immaculate devastation. Each seems a telephone call, a withheld sentence or a cobalt wave away from collapse, yet her lashes remain exact and her coiffure refuses ruin. What fascinates me is not merely the tear, but the discipline surrounding it: Ben-Day dots hold formation, black contours enclose her features and high-key color behaves impeccably while the figure within absorbs a psychic shock. I have little appetite, however, for litigating yet again whether repetition constitutes theft, transformation or some exquisitely American combination of both. The illustrators whose panels supplied his source material deserve rigorous attribution, certainly, although that debate cannot consume everything his art became. The sharper question concerns what occurs when lived experience is compressed into a reproducible code. How does mass culture package grief, appetite, violence and humiliation for immedia