It was only after having left the retrospective of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's prints at the Henry that I learned there are four paintings included among the 77 prints in the exhibition. Overwhelmed by the artist's stark, Day-Glo imagery, I did not pay much attention to whether the works were lithographs, screen-prints, or oils on canvas. If the show were a painting retrospective, it would be raising a bigger ruckus throughout the city—paintings are not multiples, so they are more rare and considered more valuable by collectors. But in Lichtenstein's case, it makes little difference which medium is on display.

True to pop, he turned comic book and advertising images into art, littering his works with WHAAMs, BOOMs, jetfighters, and blondes. He also did the reverse, turning unique paintings by Picasso and Monet into reproducible images made of hundreds of little dots, modeled on newspaper-printing techniques. The Lichtenstein print show looks like an advertisement for an imaginary Lichtenstein painting show (as, no doubt, the reverse would as well), and this is exactly the point.

The wager pop made by stripping fine art of its elite status above the fray of the commercial arts was always hedged by the knowledge that its practitioners would eventually be recognized as fine artists in the romantic, individualistic tradition. An early print such as Two Indians (1953), whose chunky figures and imperfections are a welcome contrast to the hardcore pop works, confirm that behind the quasi-mechanical constructor of pop is a human. Lichtenstein seems constantly to play with the precision of his images, drawing attention to the crispness of his lines in one print and intentionally blurring them in another. These subtle variations, seen in prints throughout his career, are evidence of an active artistic manipulation of otherwise anonymous or derivative subject matter. For Lichtenstein, fine art is not undermined. It expands.