Of all the images that raced across U2's massive video wall during the band's PopMart tour this summer, there was one work which most would instantly recognise as Pop Art. On the screen, a fighter plane unleashes rockets that stream across the blue sky, trailing flames of red, yellow and black. The crowd cheers.

Some may have recognised the comic-book style of Roy Lichtenstein, who died in New York this week; some may have revelled in another layer of irony, added to the painter's already brash appropriations; some may simply have enjoyed a good explosion. Lichtenstein's intricately flippant paintings made room for all types of admirers.

In the early 1960s, when the New York-born painter began exhibiting his canvases, based on American comic book designs, his work almost immediately became the emblem for the movement that was then being drawn together under such cumbersome titles as The New Paintings of Common Objects or New Realism. Not surprisingly, those titles were quickly replaced by the term Pop Art to describe the rising generation of painters which included Lichtenstein, along with Oldenberg, Rosenquist and Warhol.

It was not until Lichtenstein was in his late thirties that he developed the famous style, with its hand-painted big dots and thick sweeping outlines, which became his signature. Indeed, the painter had had his first solo show as early as 1949 and for a time worked in the Abstract Expressionist style.

In the 1960s, he was appointed assistant professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey, where he first met the men who were to become his colleagues in the Pop Art movement. It was only after he began working with comic-book source material, produced with the Benday process, that his career began in earnest. Legend has it that Lichtenstein first turned to working with comic books when one of his two sons pointed to a Walt Disney illustration and goaded the painter "I bet you can't paint as good as that."

Lichtenstein's first Leo Castelli gallery show in 1961 quickly confirmed his position at the forefront of the Pop movement. By the end of the next year, Pop was top of the New York art world's agenda. By 1966 Lichtenstein was exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, an event in which he took part again this year. His popularity, if not his innovation, has continued through the decades, and through his move away from using comic book material into more self-consciously "fine art" sources. While Lichtenstein's work was not as varied, nor as influential as that of Andy Warhol, his strength was elsewhere, in the tenacity with which he pursued a simple idea. If his critical stock has wavered somewhat, his commercial stock seems to rise undeterred.

As well as making canvases, the artist, along with a large studio of assistants, produced precious objects in every form, from crockery to jewellery. Over the years, the Lichtenstein "industry" prospered enormously, ever deepening the luscious irony of turning trash culture into high art.

Front Row has been held out due to pressure of space.