Art: An All-American Mannerist

In St. Louis, the post-Pop stylizations of Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was always the most cerebral of the Pop artists. Yet his images in the 1960s, taken from comic strips and ads—"I know how you must feel, Brad!" whispers the enormous girl's mouth to its exclusively art-world audience—were once rebuked for their dumbness, their lack of "real" art content. To mimic the processes of commercial art, to take a common image and replicate it on canvas, much larger, with hard-edged line and stenciled arrays of Ben Day dots in primary colors for shading: Could...