Head with Blue Shadow (1965).

For Roy Lichtenstein, it was better that the public was over-familiar with his work than not familiar at all, a point never lost on the American artist best known for his giant cartoon strip adaptations.

A major retrospective of the artist at London’s Tate Modern puts famous images like Whaam! and Drowning Girl centre stage, but also seeks to explain how Lichtenstein got there and where he went next.

Far less recognisable to most will be the Chinese-inspired landscapes, for example, his Mirror series or the black and white works of everyday objects such as a tyre, ball of twine and desk calendar.

Lichtenstein’s widow Dorothy, in London to help promote the show of some 125 works, said he never got carried away by his success, partly because he came to it in his late 30s.

“I do think he wore it lightly, because I think he basically viewed fame as something that could be fickle and was often fickle,” she added.

Dorothy married the artist in 1968, and he died in 1997 aged 73. Since then his stature has grown, with important canvases fetching a small fortune at auction including Sleeping Girl, which sold for $45 million at Sotheby’s last year.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who turned cartoon strips into high art, he never read comics as a child.

“But of course his children, the boys, had comic books – war heroes and all, and so he saw in those I think the great possibility for imagery,” Dorothy explained.

“He really liked that heightened sense. They are archetypes really, you know the hero pilot and the beautiful girl falling in love or heartbroken.”

Those ironic images of idealised beauty and glamorised violence came mostly from the early to mid-1960s, shortly after he broke with abstract expressionism and turned to mass culture imagery including comic strips and advertising.

The turning point came in 1961 with Look Mickey, included in the Tate show, when Lichtenstein first copied cartoon characters aged 37 or 38.

That image, and an exhibition at the Leo Castelli gallery the following year, made him one of the central figures of American pop art but also divided critics and the public.

Dorothy believes that part of the appeal of Lichtenstein’s comic strip images were their familiarity.

“When Roy and other artists of that time entered on the scene people were really relieved that they could recognise an image after ploughing the depths of abstract expressionism,” she said, adding that other Lichtenstein works could, however, be seen as abstract.

The exhibition runs from today to May 27.