The nation did not initially enjoy looking in the mirror that Lichtenstein and Warhol were thrusting toward it: in 1964, Life magazine asked of Lichtenstein, 'IsВ heВ the worst artist in America?'Дetail of Interior with Waterlilies (1991). But Lichtenstein is just as willing to efface the image, and its maker, as his audience: in his 1978 Self-Portrait, he puts a blank mirror where the artist's head should be.ДЄt the same moment that Lichtenstein was discovering that he could use popular culture to ask searching questions about concept, form and technique, Andy Warhol was,В quite independently, also using cartoon in his experimental work: neither artist knew it yet, but Pop Art was about to spring fully formed from America's forehead. TheВ avant garde confronts kitsch, the old world confronts the new, the individual confronts the mass-produced, and the confrontational confronts the jocular, even as the visible is declaring its viewers invisible. The painting quotes abstract expressionism вЂ“ the image suggests such seminal works as Kazimir Malevich's 1915 Black Square вЂ“ while entirely subverting its tone.

Painted in the same year as his breakthrough Look Mickey, the work inВ which Lichtenstein first discovered the possibilities of using cartoons and comic strips, I Can See the Whole RoomВ вЂ¦ and There's Nobody in It! encapsulates Lichtenstein's wittiness and insight. The irony shoots in many directions, not least towards that perennial question demanded of modern art: is there anyВ there there? He is looking through a peephole, at the viewer above him a dialogue bubble declares that he can see no one in the room where we, presumably, are standing.

From behind the circle peers the face of a jutting-jawed comic-strip man, illuminated by a bright background ofВ yellow. The painting depicts a large back square, out of which a circle has been cut. I n November 2011, Roy Lichtenstein's 1961 I Can See the Whole Room вЂ¦ and There's Nobody in It! was sold by Christie's for $43.2 million.

And then there's this heretic