Girl with ball

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Girl with ball
(Girl with Ball)
Roy Lichtenstein , 1961
Oil on canvas
153.7 x 92.7 cm
Museum of Modern Art , New York City

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Girl with Ball (original title Girl with Ball ) is a painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein from 1961. The 153.7 × 92.7 cm picture is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City . Lichtenstein painted the picture after an advertisement for a vacation in the Pocono Mountains .

Image description

In the portrait format painting , a young woman is shown as a half-portrait that begins below the breast. She stands in front of the viewer and holds a red and white ball over her head with both hands and arms outstretched. She turns her face to the viewer, her mouth is open. She wears a dark blue swimsuit, which is set off in the chest area with a white border and is held over the shoulders with thin straps. Lichtenstein repeated the colors of the swimsuit for the hairstyle. The open, shoulder-length hair is also dark blue and structured by white wavy lines.

The background consists of an evenly yellow painted sky and in the lower area of ​​white water, which is delimited at the top by a wavy line.

The picture is painted in the comic and two-dimensional style typical for Roy Lichtenstein, structures are only made recognizable by contour drawings and painted in one color. The face, arms and cleavage of the young woman are filled with pink-flesh-colored dots, the so-called benday dots .

Emergence

Lichtenstein got the inspiration for the picture Girl with Ball from a newspaper advertisement that promised a perfect honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains in northwestern Pennsylvania and was illustrated with a black and white photograph of a young woman playing a ball. With her wavy hair and open mouth, a perfect figure and shaved armpits, the woman portrayed the cliché of the typical American young woman in advertising.

Effect and classification in the work of Lichtenstein

In his painting, Lichtenstein concentrates entirely on the posture of women, whereby the dynamics of the ball game are lost and freeze into an artificial pose. At the same time, he depicted the woman larger than life, simplified the photo template to the two-dimensional effect of a comic print and only used the basic colors . In the 1960s, for reasons of cost, comics were mostly printed with a reduced color palette or with a coarse grid or full color areas .

Since there were no economic reasons for reducing the choice of colors in a painting, i.e. showing the hair and the swimsuit in the same blue, although the hair should be black, Lichtenstein's strategy becomes visible: Through this transformation, the viewer should be a template in the motif suspect from a comic series. As is customary in many of his paintings, he only used the effect of a commercial mass reproduction for the picture effect, which also applies to other details such as the open mouth, in which the white gap represents the teeth. The inclination of the mouth achieved in this way is reminiscent of the ball, which is shown in the same colors.

The "typical" young woman
(external web links)

Lichtenstein used the motif of the typical young woman in a number of other works, which appear very smooth, especially in his early work, and usually does exactly what the viewer "expects" from a young woman. In Der Kuss ( The Kiss ), 1963, she is in the arms of a young officer and in Das Meisterwerk ( The Masterpiece ) she encourages a young artist. In Drowning Girl , 1963, she literally drowns in her own tears - Lichtenstein was inspired to the water wave by the famous woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa by the Japanese Hokusai .

supporting documents

  1. Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. 1994, pp. 31-32.
  2. Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. 1994, p. 31.
  3. Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. 1994, p. 32.
  4. ^ A b c Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Image Duplicator
  5. Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. 1994, p. 34.

literature

  • Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne 1988, 1994, ISBN 3-8228-9135-5 .

Note: The externally linked images are protected by copyright and are not subject to the GNU FDL .