Using a magic marker, tape and painted and printed board on paper, Lichtenstein made this “Collage for Still Life with Picasso,†1973, come alive with brilliant reds and yellows contrasting with the face at the right and strategically placed black Benday dots.

As a Pop Art trailblazer in the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein (1923‱997) captivated the art world with a fresh, new and exciting visual language. His iconoclastic style melded imagery from popular American culture with hard-edged commercial techniques from advertising and comic strips. His precisely applied bold primary colors, slanting stripes, Benday dots and thick black outlines made his work stand out.

In the words of art historian Avis Berman, Lichtenstein was “an artist dedicated to reexamining problems of form, composition, interpretation and technique.” Now an icon of Pop Art, his work seems destined for enduring popularity.

In choosing his subjects, Lichtenstein cast a wide net. He depicted landscapes and interiors, nudes and still lifes with equal facility. With wit and skill, he appropriated ideas from such Twentieth Century artistic titans as Picasso, Millet, Matisse and Monet, and popular entertainment characters like Dagwood Bumstead, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Referring to his wide-ranging use of commonplace imagery, Lichtenstein explained, “The art of today is all around us.”

The means by which the artist arrived at his iconic images is explored in a fascinating exhibition, “Lichtenstein in Process,” which opened at the Katonah (N.Y.) Museum of Art and is on view at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis through January 17. Originally organized by the Fundacion Juan March in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, the show comprises 65 preliminary sketches, drawings and collages, 1970s‱990s, which offer rare glimpses into the artist’s creative process.

The artist achieved this come-hither look and the softness of the tempting beauty in this drawing for “Seductive Girl,†1996, through astute use of minimal, undulating graphite lines. It measures 10 by 13½ inches.

Guest curator Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, points out that Lichtenstein’s “personal sourcebooks, clippings, sketchbooks and many, many extant drawings and collages offer some of the best clues to his thoughts and process, plus his hand, touch and eye. In these works, he is planning and scheming, musing on composition and source.” He adds that these materials allow observers “to see the selective, editorial artist at work, effecting his trademark transformation of a known or given form or even a form he has thought up freehand into something uniquely his own, while pushing at the boundaries or capabilities of art media.”

A New York City native, Lichtenstein attended Ohio State University, where his schooling in figure-ground relationships influenced his later work. Back in New York, he worked first in the prevailing Abstract Expressionist style.

In the late 1950s, Lichtenstein began to execute Expressionist versions of such mundane subjects as machine parts, dollar bills, cowboys and Indians, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. “I had the idea of painting banal subject matter of some kind or other, very standard, cliché work,” Lichtenstein said.

In this “Drawing for Still Life,†1973 †a mere 8¼ by 5 inches †Lichtenstein used graphite and colored pencils to lay out the basic composition for a collage in which a number of revisions are visible.

The artist rapidly crystallized his mature style. He began a picture by making a graphite drawing based on an image projected on the canvas. He refined this composition with a tape drawing, gradually clarifying his line by cutting away small pieces of tape, or adding tape to expand the line’s thickness. Next, he attached flat color areas and papers imprinted with dots and diagonal stripes directly on the canvas, enabling him to judge their impact in actual size. At this juncture Lichtenstein often changed details of the plan, instinctively responding to the composition of the paper-covered canvas, removing collage sections as he painted in line with his revised plan.

He preferred uniformly intense reds, yellows and blues, and occasionally greens; intermediate shades produced by placing Benday dots in white fields; heavy, black outlines and front-facing figures.

Although his choice of subjects was personal, Lichtenstein’s sensibility encouraged impersonality. As the artist put it, “I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial.” Later he observed that “I want my painting to look as though it has been programmed.”

Since these early images were drawn from commercial art and executed in an impersonal manner, largely indifferent to “fine art” standards, they were classified as “Pop Art.” In reality, their sophistication and elegance went far beyond popular levels of taste.

Lichtenstein’s fame rests on ways he was stimulated by themes and images from mass culture, advertising and comic strips. “Lichtenstein’s art is simultaneously a critique and an incessantly curious homage, further infused with autobiographical content and intention,” says Cowart. “All this eventually subverts our thinking into his terms more than our own.”

By the early 1960s he started producing seemingly objective versions of his cartoon subjects, developing techniques that imitated the effects of normal commercial printing, as well as such processes as Benday dots and mechanically projected images. His works, however, were far from mere facsimiles of their mass-media prototypes.

Lichtenstein relished turning comic strip figures like Dagwood Bumstead, the hapless husband in the long-running Blondie, into works of art. This is a preliminary drawing for “Dagwood,†1983.

Discussing his style in the exhibition catalog interview, Lichtenstein said it “is not one of having give-and-take, it just comes out miraculously. It’s just the style, but it isn’t the way it happens. I collage these paintings over and over again, so I’m really working with it in the same way you would with an Expressionist work, but I don’t want traces of all that activity going on.”

According to his assistants, Lichtenstein’s sheer love of painting undergirded a dedicated work ethic that was manifested in creation of multiple projects at the same time. “All Roy wanted to do was paint,” says former assistant Richard Dimmier. “That’s it. He got up, we had to have lunch during the day, but otherwise he went back and painted until [his wife] Dorothy told him he had to stop and do something social for the evening.”

During a normal studio workday, Dimmier recalls, “Roy would start by doing a drawing. Everything from Roy came from the sketch in the morning he made at his drafting table or the cartoon he might do at night.”

While watching television with his wife, says Dimmier, “he had sketch pads and would churn out&⁩deas. Then he would put them up and turn it into a drawing. Every painting started off with a cartoon, every sculpture started off with a cartoon, and got revised, enlarged and continued down the process.”

The sketches and drawings on view reflect Lichtenstein’s creative genius via his personal hand and spirit. Half the exhibition’s works are interior images suggesting the inside of a house or studio. Other works locate figures and objects outside in fictional landscapes.

Expanding on his approach, Lichtenstein once said, “I like to do the drawings for the paintings, where I begin to organize the material and get the idea for the material&‮That’s always pleasurable. Redrawing it when it’s on the canvas is something I like to do. When I project it, I try to draw it again, trying not to copy the projection&⁉ redraw the position of each line. I know approximately where it’s going to be. Then I redo that. I semi-erase the whole thing, and I draw it again.”

This brightly hued collage, an advanced stage in Lichtenstein’s preparatory process, shows everyone’s hero, Dagwood Bumstead, in a characteristically agitated state.

Throughout this process Lichtenstein was able to inspect the canvas from all directions by using a rotating easel he designed. He also used a mirror to evaluate his composition by looking at it in reverse and from “twice as far away.” Early highlights in the show are the drawing and collage for “Still Life,” 1973, punctuated with bright reds, yellows and blues in a compressed, Modern composition. It demonstrates the artist’s gifts as a decorative stylist.

In his idiosyncratic “Reflections” series, Lichtenstein utilized reproductions of paintings by Picasso, including “Still Life with Picasso,” 1973, “Interior with Girl Drawing,” 1977, and “Painter and Model,” 1990, and other avant-garde stars, mixing them with his own motifs. In each, the central image is partly obscured by reflective streaks, as if behind glass or reflected in a mirror. In the finished composition, all elements were translated into Lichtenstein’s off-beat visual language.

In his “Water Lilies” series, an homage to Monet, Lichtenstein employed aluminum foil to enhance reflections on water. “Water Lilies with Japanese Bridge,” and “Water Lilies †Blue Lily Pads,” both 1992, were screens painted with enamel on stainless steel with machine-made patterns of tiny swirls scratched into it. These colorful, compelling images were made at Saff Tech Arts studio in Oxford, Md.

The artist was drawn to Belgian artist Herge’s 1920s comic strip character Tintin, a boy reporter and his dog. Following Herge’s “clear line” style of drawing, Lichtenstein created the cover for a novel depicting the boy and his dog barely escaping an assassin’s knife. “Tintin Reading,” 1993, shows Matisse’s “Dance I” painting hanging beside the hero.

Lichtenstein used this sketch of a boy reporter and his dog in preparing the cover for a novel about their exploits. “Tintin Reading,†1992, is based on images by a Belgian artist in the 1920s. Note the assassin’s knife whizzing past Tintin’s left side.

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, Lichtenstein responded to a request from an art dealer by making a collage and print of the White House’s Oval Office. His image remained fairly true to the photographs from which he worked, albeit the artist emphasized balance of line and color, rather than the illusion of depth, in his images. Outlining objects in stark black made them stand out, including the subtle undulation of the draperies. To the right of the presidential desk is one of the artist’s 1980 “Forms in Space.” “Oval Office,” 1992, was executed as a print and poster for the Democratic National Convention of that year.

Dagwood Bumstead, the timeless †and hapless †comic strip favorite, appears with a suitably alarmed look on his face in “Collage for Two Paintings: Dagwood,” 1983. Created out of tape, black marker, painted and printed paper on board, this colorful image measures 54¾ by 40 inches.

Lichtenstein originally created his famous nudes by removing clothing from 1960s comic book caricatures of women. “My nudes are part light and shade, and so are the backgrounds, with dots to indicate the shade,” he observed. He noted that in his nudes there was “so little sense of body flesh or skin tones †they’re so unrealistic †that using them underscored the separation between reality and artistic convention.”

On view, in addition to iconic full-length depictions of nudes cavorting on beaches and posing like Henri Matisse images, “Seductive Girl,” 1996, offers a closeup of an alluring, recumbent blonde. Lichtenstein’s lines fluctuate in gentle curves, evoking the softness of her lips, flesh and hair.

Amending his drawing, Lichtenstein lowered the “CRAC†symbol and clarified the image of Henri Matisse’s dancers in the window in “Collage for Tintin Reading,†1993. It was created for the cover of Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World, published in 1993.

One of Lichtenstein’s focuses during his final decade was a series of interiors based on elegant images in publications such as Architectural Digest . The resulting compositions tend to be neat, orderly, bland, claustrophobic and oddly colored. “Interior With Exterior (Still Waters),” 1991, all in black, white and yellow, features a patio and pool glimpsed through a sliding glass door. The shimmering surface of the pool is based on a Clyfford Still painting, while the portrait next to the door is a parody of Lichtenstein’s own 1962 parody of Gilbert Stuart’s likeness of George Washington.

In the late 1990s, Lichtenstein produced some decorative holograms featuring chairs in house interiors. “Hologram Interior,” 1996 showcases black and-white striped floors set off by vividly colored furnishings.

Among the last works of Lichtenstein’s career were several sculptures that evolved out of large-scale interior paintings of the early 1990s. The drawings for this series are realistic renderings of three-dimensional structures, but in the final sculptures the walls and roof are composed on three different planes that blend into each other. Typically, “House II,” 1997, fools the eye and changes dimensions as viewers walk around it. A version in the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden fascinates visitors.

Today, Roy Lichtenstein’s art is instantly recognizable. This revelatory show demonstrates how his polished graphic style resulted from disciplined preliminary work that transformed commonplace images of popular culture into art of formal beauty and sly wit. From comic book characters to images of the Oval Office to appropriations from Picasso, Lichtenstein connected high and low artistic themes by using his idiosyncratic style, abstract concepts and artistic process. His work challenges viewers to reassess everyday images †and to reconsider the definition of art itself.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 44-page, well-illustrated catalog published by Katonah Museum of Art that features an extended interview with Lichtenstein by Berman.

Dixon Gallery and Gardens is at 4338 Park Avenue. For information, 901-761-5250 or www.dixon.org .