Drowning Girl

''Drowning Girl'' (also known as ''Secret Hearts'' or ''I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink'') is a 1963 American painting in oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein, based on original art by Tony Abruzzo. The painting is considered among Lichtenstein's most significant works, perhaps on a par with his acclaimed 1963 diptych '' Whaam!''. One of the most representative paintings of the pop art movement, ''Drowning Girl'' was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1971.

The painting has been described as a "masterpiece of melodrama", and is one of the artist's earliest images depicting women in tragic situations, a theme to which he often returned in the mid-1960s. It shows a teary-eyed woman on a turbulent sea. She is emotionally distressed, seemingly from a romance. Using the conventions of comic book art, a thought bubble reads: "I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink — Than Call Brad For Help!" This narrative element highlights the clichéd melodrama, while its graphics — including Ben-Day dots that echo the effect of the printing process — reiterate Lichtenstein's theme of painterly work that imitates mechanized reproduction. The work is derived from a 1962 DC Comics panel; both the graphical and narrative elements of the work are cropped from the source image. It also borrows from Hokusai's ''The Great Wave off Kanagawa'' and from elements of modernist artists Jean Arp and Joan Miró. It is one of several Lichtenstein works that mention a character named Brad who is absent from the picture.

Background

During the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of American painters began to adapt the imagery and motifs of comic strips. Roy Lichtenstein made drawings of comic strip characters in 1958. Andy Warhol produced his earliest paintings in the style in 1960. Lichtenstein, unaware of Warhol's work, produced '' Look Mickey'' and ''Popeye'' in 1961. Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to ''Campbell's Soup Cans'' as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Lichtenstein. He once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing."

''Drowning Girl'' depicted the advancement of Lichtenstein's cartoon work, which represented his 1961 departure from his abstract expressionism period, from animated cartoons to more serious themes such as romance and wartime armed forces. Lichtenstein said that, at the time, "I was very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images." Lichtenstein parodied four Picassos between 1962 and 1963. Picasso's depictions of weeping women may have influenced Lichtenstein to produce portrayals of vulnerable teary-eyed women, such as the subjects of '' Hopeless'' and ''Drowning Girl''. Another possible influence on his emphasis on depicting distressed women in the early- to mid-1960s was that his first marriage was dissolving at the time. Lichtenstein's first marriage to Isabel Wilson, which resulted in two sons, lasted from 1949 to 1965; the couple separated in 1963.

When Lichtenstein made his transition to comic-based work, he began to mimic the style while adapting the subject matter. He applied simplified color schemes and commercial printing-like techniques. The style he adopted was "simple, well-framed images solid fields of bold color often bounded by thick, stark border lines." The borrowed technique was "representing tonal variations with patterns of colored circles that imitated the half-tone screens of Ben-Day dots used in newspaper printing". PBS asserts that this is an adaptation of the ligne claire style associated with Hergé. Lichtenstein once said of his technique: "I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental."

The subject of ''Drowning Girl'' is an example of Lichtenstein's post-1963 comics-based women who "look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance, as if they all came out of the same pot of makeup." In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein produced several "fantasy drama" paintings of women in love affairs with domineering men causing women to be miserable, such as ''Drowning Girl'', ''Hopeless'' and ''In the Car''. These works served as prelude to 1964 paintings of innocent "girls next door" in a variety of tenuous emotional states. "In ''Hopeless'' and ''Drowning Girl'', for example, the heroines appear as victims of unhappy love affairs, with one displaying helplessness ... and the other defiance (she would rather drown than ask for her lover's help)." ''Drowning Girl'', the aforementioned works and '' Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But...'' are among those tragedies that make the author a popular draw at museums.

History

''Drowning Girl'' is derived from the splash page from "Run for Love!", illustrated by Tony Abruzzo and lettered by Ira Schnapp, in ''Secret Hearts'' #83 (November 1962), DC Comics. This is the same comic book issue that inspired ''Hopeless''.

In 1963, Lichtenstein was parodying various types of sources such as commercial illustrations, comic imagery and even modern masterpieces. The masterpieces represented what could have been dubbed the "canon" of art and was thought of as "high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images. His masterworks sources included the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso. During this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." At the time, Lichtenstein was exploring the theme of "industrialization of emotion". In Lichtenstein's obituary, ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Christopher Knight said the work was "a witty rejoinder to De Kooning