One thing is for sure: Roy Lichtenstein was not afraid of red, yellow, and blue.

The primary colors burst shamelessly from his canvases upon the skylighted white cube that is the Gagosian Gallery’s uptown powerhouse premises. The show gathers 16 paintings and related sculptural works and multiples from the Pop artist’s classic early-1960s period of romance cartoon figuration, his “Girls.”

These Benday-dotted beauties cast their sweet siren smiles at us, or are lost in delectably sad thoughts, or simply look about aimlessly with gorgeous vacuity. “Although he holds his brush and palette in his hands, I know his heart is always with me!” ponders a blue-eyed blonde in a white evening gown at her piano, daisies in her hair, lips parted to expose pearly teeth.

“Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work!” exclaims a blonde with Asiatic eyes, her red lipstick matching her dress, as a coolly pleased-with-himself square-jawed brute of an artist fixes his steady gaze upon his handiwork.

Lichtenstein’s embrace of the primaries almost seems a direct answer to the provocative title of Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” except that the dates do not tally: The Abstract Expressionist landmark painting is from 1966, fully three years after the “girls” had all of New York clamoring for Lichtenstein.

Thanks to his “girls,” Lichtenstein vies with Piet Mondrian, high priest of purist Modernism, as the 20th-century artist we instantly identify with the primary colors. Later, Lichtenstein would indeed “take on” Mondrian, as so many canonical Modernists, including Léger, Picasso, Van Doesburg, and Braque, absorbing them all into his finely honed language of slick graphic design and the Benday dot, appropriated from advertising and the comic book. Lichtenstein’s career can be characterized as an ongoing wrestling feat in which he battled simultaneously for high art and low, trashing the one, elevating the other. He was a chameleon who could flip instantaneously between champion and debunker of art for art’s sake.

He turned to cartoon characters around the same time as Andy Warhol, with similar iconoclastic intent. “Look Mickey” (1961) has Donald Duck exclaim to a literally gob-smacked Mickey Mouse, “Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” There is little question regarding the subtext of this appropriated cartoon image: The Disney characters in this 10-by-14-foot canvas are artists who have caught a march on Abstract Expressionist painting, capturing the scale, dynamism, and novelty of the predominant movement of the day. Warhol’s “Popeye” of 1961 was a similar blow at Action painting.

The outrageous genius of Pop was to be both everything that Abstract Expressionism was not, and a few things that it was. Its coolness, dispassion, connection with vernacular culture, instant accessibility, commercialism, and sentimentality flew in the face of New York School values. But its scale, immediacy, and prizing of the pared-down all capitalized on Abstract Expressionism’s formal achievements.

Lichtenstein completely overturned the art values of the day by taking on the idea of authenticity: Instead of finding his image in the existential struggle of painting he would find it in comic books. Instead of prizing difficulty, he vied for the appeal of lowest-common-denominator pulp. Romance stories were a calculated riposte to the machismo of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His process was similar in aim. His language was all about slowed-down execution, clean lines, and calculated devices. Later he would make explicit the art-historical significance of his technical break with his avant-garde predecessors in his comic book rendering of a juicy, Ab-Ex brushstroke, meticulously capturing the randomness of splurge and drip in his graphic precision.

But Lichtenstein’s “girls” are almost as remote from their picture-book source as from the heroic painting styles they affronted. The scale of printed marks in the original had so much to do with legibility in a tight space, and flow to the next image. By blowing up and isolating an appropriated comic book image, he turned it into art, something inherently abstract and ethereal. Close up, the dots and lines lose their strict communication function to become isolated signs, marks of interest in themselves.

In “Little Aloha” (1962), for instance, the selectively placed accents that signify facial features, the brackets or commas that stand in for her cute, turned-up little nose or that crease her eyes into a smile, become abstract non-signifying marks recalling the linear elements in a Miró or Kandinsky painting. The slight misregistration between sheets of Benday dots subtly subverts the smooth perfection of her skin to take on a life of its own as a patterned grid, autonomous from the flesh that it is supposed to evoke.

Half a century on, Lichtenstein’s girls have aged rather well. In their trite glamour, they still exude a good, clean fun that is innocent of the abject sexism that marred a great deal of Pop art that followed in their wake. Physically, the canvases have dulled ever so slightly, but there is a reminder of their intended impact in the three works from 1964 in porcelain enamel on steel in the small annex gallery, which have a chromatic brilliance and coolly crafted impersonality as glowing as the day they were baked.

Lichtenstein devoted his career to well-natured rebuttals of artistic orthodoxies. To Gauguin’s glum dictum that nothing pretty can be beautiful, Lichtenstein’s girls flutter their eyelashes.

Until June 28 (980 Madison Ave., between 76th and 77th streets, 212-744-2312).