Crying Girl - Milwaukee Art Museum - Milwaukee WI
Crying Girl
Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997)
Crying Girl, 1964
Crying Girl was one of Roy Lichtenstein’s first ventures into producing enamel-on-steel multiples of the comic-strip imagery he had first introduced in conventional hand-painted canvases. This innovative, industrial means of “mass production” was as ground-breaking as his distinctive subject matter. With other leading American Pop artists, Lichtenstein turned to popular culture and the worlds of commerce and advertising for attitudes and approaches as well as for content. Eliminating any trace of the individual artist’s hand in favor of reinforcing the notion of its mechanical origin, here Lichtenstein emphasized in rigid black outlines and the benday dots of printing the primacy of the image itself – a sentimental, glamorized and equally “mechanical” idealization of the American girl.
Crying Girl - Milwaukee Art Museum - Milwaukee WI
Crying Girl
Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997)
Crying Girl, 1964
Crying Girl was one of Roy Lichtenstein’s first ventures into producing enamel-on-steel multiples of the comic-strip imagery he had first introduced in conventional hand-painted canvases. This innovative, industrial means of “mass production” was as ground-breaking as his distinctive subject matter. With other leading American Pop artists, Lichtenstein turned to popular culture and the worlds of commerce and advertising for attitudes and approaches as well as for content. Eliminating any trace of the individual artist’s hand in favor of reinforcing the notion of its mechanical origin, here Lichtenstein emphasized in rigid black outlines and the benday dots of printing the primacy of the image itself – a sentimental, glamorized and equally “mechanical” idealization of the American girl.