''Girl with Ball'' is a 1961 painting by

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. Hi ...

. It is an oil on canvas Pop art work that is now in the collection of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, after being owned for several decades by Philip Johnson. It is one of Lichtenstein's earliest Pop art works and is known for its source, which is a newspaper ad that ran for several decades and which was among Lichtenstein's earliest works sourced from pop culture. ''Girl with Ball'' was exhibited at Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition and was displayed in ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis (businessman), Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print m ...

'' review of the show. This work significantly alters the original source and is considered exemplary of Lichtenstein's works that exaggerate the mechanically produced appearance although the result of his painterly work. It is an enduring depiction of the contemporary beauty figure.

Background

''Girl with Ball'' was inspired by a 1961 advertisement for the

Mount Airy Lodge The Mount Airy Lodge, built in the 1890s, was a five-star hotel and resort located in Paradise Township near Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. It was closed in October 2001 and demolished in subsequent years. The site now houses Mount Airy Casino Resor ...

in the Pocono Mountains. The ad, which started running in 1955, was widely published in the

New York metropolitan area The New York metropolitan area, also commonly referred to as the Tri-State area, is the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass, at , and one of the list of most populous metropolitan areas, most populous urban agg ...

and elsewhere, including several prominent newspapers such as ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' and the '' Daily News''. The advertisement was still running in newspapers more than twenty years after Lichtenstein produced the work. According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, in autumn 1961, a fellow teacher at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

named

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as ...

made introductions between Lichtenstein and

Leo Castelli Leo Castelli (born Leo Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements which ...

Gallery director

Ivan Karp Ivan C. Karp (June 4, 1926 – June 28, 2012) was an American art dealer, gallerist and author instrumental in the emergence of pop art and the development of Manhattan's SoHo gallery district in the 1960s. Ivan Karp was born in the Bronx and gr ...

. Lichtenstein showed Karp several paintings including ''Girl with Ball'', which was the one that intrigued Karp. Karp agreed to represent Lichtenstein weeks later. After showing the painting to

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

, he sold it to architect Philip Johnson that November. The painting appeared in ''

'' 1962 review of Lichtenstein's Castelli Gallery show. The work appeared in the April 3, 1963 "Pop! Goes the Easel" show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston along with his ''Brattata'' (1962) and ''Head-Red and Yellow'' (1962).

Description

''Girl with Ball'' depicts a woman wearing a bathing suit holding a beach ball with red stripes in the same color as her lips and tongue. Lichtenstein used a painter's version of

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

artist techniques to create his own rendition of the subject of a nostalgic photograph, resulting in a simplified work of art with its own appeal. He produced the work using

Ben-Day dots The Ben Day process is a printing and photoengraving technique for producing areas of grey or (with four-colour printing) various colours by using fine patterns of ink on the paper. It was developed in 1879 by illustrator and printer Benjamin H ...

of primary colors. The process is described as exaggerating the "limitations of mechanical reproduction" to strip the photograph of its polish in a startling and intense form. In 1961, this painting was groundbreaking. Facial features such as nose and mouth are depicted using "commercial shorthand". His process of reworking original artwork is described as "abstraction by subtraction", in which all features of the original are reduced to simple graphic elements. Lichtenstein alters the planar position of the subject of the picture to position her "nearer to the picture plane". He drew the picture more distorted than might be expected of a cartoonist by augmenting and focusing on her two-dimensionality.

Reception

The image and technique were regarded as unartistic. However, the painting presented an allusion to printing technology, with its Ben-Day dots, and to art history, with its "

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...

forms". Though "crude and simplistic" the work demonstrates artistic intellect. ''Girl with Ball'' is described by Diane Waldman as "striking" in the simple and bold way it presents a vacation atmosphere. She notes it is "reminiscent of

Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

's frolicking bather in one of his paintings on the subject, ''Bather with Beach Ball'' (fig. 48), 1932," especially in the way Lichtenstein has scaled down the representation and the way he depicts movement. The newspaper ad source provided Lichtenstein with "one of the most common tropes of the day for the image of a woman." The updated Betty Grable-type subject, was a fashionable glamor figure that Lichtenstein used for a symbolic value that ranks her with "iconoclastic female figures, including Manet's ''

Olympia The name Olympia may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Olympia'' (1938 film), by Leni Riefenstahl, documenting the Berlin-hosted Olympic Games * ''Olympia'' (1998 film), about a Mexican soap opera star who pursues a career as an athlet ...

'', 1863,

's '' Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', 1907 and de Kooning's three series of ''

Women A woman is an adult female human. Prior to adulthood, a female human is referred to as a girl (a female child or Adolescence, adolescent). The plural ''women'' is sometimes used in certain phrases such as "women's rights" to denote female hum ...

''".

Notes

References

* *

External links