Lichtenstein

Taschen's Basic Art volume on Lichtenstein is the kind of introduction the series does well: ninety-six pages, a chronological run through the career, the key paintings reproduced large and the apparatus kept short.

Janis Hendrickson traces Lichtenstein from Look, Mickey of 1961, the painting he made after his sons dared him to draw a comic character, through Drowning Girl and Whaam! to the Brushstrokes, the Mirrors and the later art-historical paraphrases, explaining the Ben-Day dot and the enlarged commercial-printing vocabulary that became his signature. A chronology of the artist's life closes the book. Taschen first issued the title in 1988 and has revised it repeatedly; it now appears in the hardcover Basic Art Series 2.0 format.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997) came to Pop in his late thirties after years of Cubist-inflected figuration, and spent the rest of his career testing how much of art history could survive translation into dots, flat colour and printed line. This volume sits on the shelf alongside the fuller monographs as an entry point.