When the painter and sculptor Richard Pettibone was in art school in Los Angeles in the early 1960shawkplay, he was taught that there were two things he should never do.

One, he said, was “copy other people’s work.” The other was “repeat myself.”

He soon changed his mind about both and became a prankish virtuoso of appropriation art, with a twist: He created miniature copies of works by modern and contemporary masters, usually no bigger than baseball cards or pictures of the paintings he clipped from Artforum and other publications.

“He had a commitment to working on a small scale, which didn’t change over the years,” said his wife, Nancy (Becker) Pettibone, a toy designer. “The scale thing came quite naturally to him. He was a miniature railroader, so he was used to thinking in teeny-tiny land.”

He did not use a magnifying glass to study the originals as he painted, she said. “He had extraordinary eyesight.”

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Mr. Pettibone’s miniatures offered a skewed way of looking at the originals that he borrowed (and credited), including Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, flowers, Brillo boxes and Marilyn Monroe silk-screen paintings; Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Woman With a Flowered Hat”; Frank Stella’s striped paintings; and Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.”

ImageRichard Pettibone’s work was the focus of an exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York in 2018. Mr. Pettibone’s miniatures offered a skewed way of looking at the originals that he borrowed (and credited), including Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can. Credit...Object Studies

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