As one might expect, the retrospective exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s work at the National Gallery of Art is, quite literally, explosive. In spite of their familiarity, the bursts of color and graphism still manage to excite. The surprise of Lichtenstein’s technique and source material may have worn over time, but his oeuvre, laid out across fourteen rooms spanning three decades, offers new moments of revelation. Alongside the well-known cartoon melodramas of love and war are early abstractions in an imitative expressionist style; late, expansive canvases inspired by Chinese landscape painting; peculiar forays into a mock-Art Deco manner; and a vast array of master studies, all executed in that eminently identifiable Lichtenstein technique. In this first, comprehensive retrospective since the artist’s death in 1997, what strikes is the unrelenting self-reflective character of Lichtenstein’s work. Organized thematically rather than strictly chronologically, the exhibition insists on his penchant for returning to and reworking certain motifs as he challenged and stretched his formal vocabulary of dots, stripes, contours, and flat color. Through each genre category and across the years, the paintings continually reference each other and address their status as paintings: challenging it, mocking it, pushing its very limits. For an oeuvre so associated with “low art,” the frequency with which it reflects on itself as painting is conspicuous, and the sophistication of Lichtenstein’s probing of the medium comes through as the unifying subject of the exhibition.

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective finds an apt home in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, where it shares mezzanine space with the small but robust in-house show Shock of the News, curated by Judith Brodie. That exhibition presents a succinct survey of the “newspaper phenomenon” in modern art, revealing the ways in which the superlatively popular medium has been used in art, as art, or at the service of art over the last century. The juxtaposition of Shock of the News with the Lichtenstein retrospective is clever, for the initial force of Lichtenstein’s work when it was exhibited in the 1960s had much to do with the shock it elicited from its use of “low” culture source materials—including, most notably, the comics page and advertisements within the daily news—and its mimicry of the news-printing technique of the Ben-Day dot. The proximity of Shock of the News serves as a reminder of the power such imagery and methods held when they first appeared in high art, and challenges viewers to consider how the power of Lichtenstein’s work has shifted and evolved as the low has been gradually assimilated to the high.

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective reveals that while the initial impulse to mimic popular images and commercial printing techniques provided the impetus for a new mode of painting, what drove him to continue to stretch this mode was the urge to get at some greater truth about painting. By organizing the work thematically, the show as a whole calls attention to these categories—the still life, the nude, the interior; romance, battle, landscape, abstraction—and yet once viewers find themselves in each room, immersed in each theme, focus is redirected from subject matter to form. Indeed, this shift reflects a current trend in the scholarship on Lichtenstein and on Pop in general, which seeks to reconsider those artists as not merely tuned in to the culture of celebrity, consumerism, and mass media, but also eminently concerned with painting as medium and as métier—and no one more so than Lichtenstein. Hal Foster has recently argued, for instance, that the tableau—the ultimate aim of ambitious early modernist painting—mattered to a figure like Lichtenstein, who valued qualities of unity and immediacy in his pictures (Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). The retrospective, with its inclusion of studies and sketches alongside finished works, evidences this conception of Lichtenstein’s pictorial ambitions, and the wall texts describing his painstaking means of preparing and executing these grand works go still further. These texts greet the viewer in each room and persistently guide the viewer to consider the formal questions raised by Lichtenstein’s chosen technique. What does it take to make black dots signify a glimmering diamond? Can a painting, which is already an object, stand in for another object? How did Lichtenstein select the “pregnant moment” in a sourced image and rearrange its elements to best suit the pictorial unity he aimed to achieve? The pictures themselves offer still more questions. What is the relationship of a picture to its mode of display: the glass that protects it, the architecture within which it hangs? Lichtenstein does not provide answers but instead tantalizes with questions, by depicting in the painting the reflective glass surface that protects it, or by turning a painting of an architectural detail into a part of the architecture itself.

The works at the entrance to the exhibition immediately expand an understanding of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, suggesting that its force and consequence transcend preconceived notions of Pop. The monumental Artist’s Studio “Look Mickey” (1973) dominates the foyer, establishing in its immense scale and self-referential subject matter the range of themes and tropes encountered throughout the exhibition, as well as hinting at the centrality of the theme of painting’s self-reflection. A fictional representation of Lichtenstein’s studio, the canvas depicts the corner of a room whose walls are lined on one side with the artist’s paintings, from the eponymous Look Mickey (1961)—his first cartoon-based picture, on view in the initial gallery—to a small, schematic landscape and a painting of a comic speech bubble, both references to series he produced in the 1960s. Above the paintings, the molding where the wall meets the ceiling recalls the Entablatures series of the 1970s (two of which are on view in the retrospective), poised high on the gallery walls so as to imitate this architectural detail. This inclusion, along with the telephone resting on a table and fruit arranged on the floor, humorously invent the conceit that Lichtenstein’s paintings are based on the observation of studio props and models, rather than on found two-dimensional source materials.

Here is where Lichtenstein’s ruminations on the fiction of painting and the limits of representation come into focus. Two final objects in Artist’s Studio “Look Mickey” reinforce his sustained interest in this problem: a mirror and the exposed back of a picture frame. These items foretell the exhibition’s revelation of Lichtenstein’s protracted meditation on painting as object and painting as painting. As Graham Bader has shown in his book Hall of Mirrors—and as he argued in a talk at the National Gallery’s 2009 Meyerhoff Symposium—mirrors and canvases, both empty of content, recur in, and sometimes as, Lichtenstein’s paintings, as a means of taking art itself as the subject of his work, and of addressing his own role as artist (Graham Bader, Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). In the retrospective, the Mirrors series of 1969–72—represented by five round canvases plus two rectangular multi-panel canvases and two small drawing studies, each taking on the shape of a mirror without pretending to adopt its function—is presented in just these terms. The Mirrors share a room with the Artist’s Studio series, and follow directly after the Art History room, an expanse of master studies spanning nearly forty years. Presented this way, they invite viewers to consider traditional associations with mirrors in both the history of art and artistic practice: the artist as “mirror of nature” and the painting as “window onto the world.” If these are traditional metaphors of art-making, then what Lichtenstein offers in his opaque paintings is a satirical subversion of both. In his hands, the mirror or window impedes rather than expands vision, insisting on its own objecthood and denying the conceit of illusionism. His pictures are pure surface, with nothing beyond them for viewers to look onto and nothing in front for them to reflect. They are simply painting.

That Artist’s Studio “Look Mickey” echoes or foretells this theme in the works displayed inside the gallery, in addition to asserting its own lighthearted testimony on the untruth of painting, makes it a fitting introduction to a sprawling exhibition that, room after room, reinforces the centrality of Lichtenstein’s problematizing of painting. But just as this picture caricatures painting, it also staunchly declares its paintedness—that is, it works to dispel the common impression of the eminent reproducibility of Lichtenstein’s work, to deny that the original and its facsimile are interchangeable. This, as James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff’s catalogue declares and the National Gallery’s mounting of the exhibition makes clear, was a priority of the curators: to implore viewers to notice the materiality of these works by calling their attention to the complexities of the surprisingly personal painting technique. Artist’s Studio “Look Mickey” not only comprises Lichtenstein’s full array of signature tactics—the dots, the stripes, the black contours, the hand-lettered text, the expanses of white or solid color—but it also includes graphite pentimenti and delicately scintillating aluminum paint, both of which reveal a subtlety of surface not perceptible in a printed copy.

The primary colors and regular patterns of the earliest Pop works find their way into nearly every piece that follows, and yet by the end of the exhibition, there is remarkably little repetition. Some rooms surprise more than others: the Landscapes of the mid-1960s, in which Lichtenstein experimented with transparency and opacity, plastic and metal and paper and board, are a highlight. On the other hand, the many art-historical parodies hit a few high notes (the Ben-Day dots make for a clever satire of Claude Monet’s silty Rouen Cathedrals from the 1890s), but on the whole feel a bit gimmicky. The last few rooms of the exhibition contain the stunningly simple Mirrors; the Perfect/Imperfect paintings, Lichtenstein’s only forays into abstraction; the late Nudes, who populate scenes reminiscent of the Artists’s Studios and early comic romances; and the Chinese-style mountainscapes, Lichtenstein’s final ambitious project. In the last gasps of a prolific show, when we think we have encountered everything Lichtenstein’s dots and lines can do, we pass through some of the most unexpected work of the artist’s career. There is still some shock in what is no longer news.