Roy Lichtenstein is considered one of the foremost pioneers of the Pop Art movement. Rising to prominence in the early 1960s with works that incorporated subject matter from popular media, Lichtenstein set himself apart from his peers who were employed as commercial illustrators—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, among them—by opting to mimic the effects of mechanical reproduction with his own hand. Steak is typical of the artist’s early drawing style. A thick, continuous contour line sets off the single object from the blank paper. Details are omitted and replaced with dots of equal size and spacing, resembling the varied Ben Day dots used to create tonal ranges in mechanical printing processes. Lichtenstein drew these circles through a perforated screen placed upon the sheet. The final effect is an image that hovers between rote-reproduction and the manifold surfaces of hand-applied graphite and crayon.
