Girl with hair band
| Girl with hair band (Girl with Hair Ribbon) |
|---|
| Roy Lichtenstein , 1965 |
| Oil and acrylic on canvas |
| 121.9 x 121.9 cm |
|
Museum of Contemporary Art , Tokyo
Link to the picture |
Girl with hair band (AKA Girl with Hair Ribbon ) is a painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein in 1965. The 48 inch x 48 inch (121.9 cm x 121.9 cm) screen is located in the Museum of Contemporary Kind in Tokyo . Lichtenstein painted the picture after the panel of a comic by John Romita senior . The painting is considered a typical work of American Pop Art and an example of abstract painting .
Image description
The square painting shows a close-up of the girl with a hairband , a young woman with a slightly tilted head in half profile . She looks over her right shoulder at the viewer with slightly lowered eyelids . At first glance, she seems troubled and pleading. On closer inspection, however, you can see her wistful and seductive look. Maybe she is flirting and wants to cover up her restraint and shyness with her red lips and shoulder-length, blonde hair that she lets fall into her face despite the hairband. This coquettish restraint is expressed primarily through the position of the shoulder, which forms a barrier to the viewer.
The colors of the headband, blue, red and white, which are detached from each other four times in wavy lines, are repeated throughout the picture. The blue can be found in the girl's eyes, the red in the background of the picture and the white on the skin, as a hint of the teeth in the slightly open mouth, and on the white skin of the eyes .
interpretation
The picture shows an example of how Lichtenstein plays with the viewer: on the one hand, he draws the viewer's attention to the idealized image of a delicate blonde, her face and her feelings; on the other hand, he makes the painting appear mechanical and cold, because the extreme enlargement of the comic forces it for a closer look and shows how abstract and artificial the representation is. The face consists of an area of the same red grid points, areas left blank represent shading. The eyes also consist of blue grid points. The golden blonde hair is nothing more than a yellow area interspersed with black contours. The shoulder is a quarter of a circle, which is delimited by a black line, partly consists of grid points or is white.
In the 1960s, comics were mostly printed with a reduced color palette or with a coarse grid for reasons of cost . With his painting style, Lichtenstein imitated this industrial production of pictures in offset printing and used single-color, flat colors that show no individuality and hide the traces of human painting. He said that his picture should face the viewer with full force and give the impression that we are not dealing with substitutes and deception, but with extremely soulful and great people. His conclusion was that what you think you see is, like an optical illusion, not what you see. Lichtenstein thus points out that what the viewer would like to see in paintings is not there anyway.
In his painting, Lichtenstein dispenses with the narrative framework of the comic and pulls the comic panel out of context. Furthermore, he changed details in the panel and removed the thought bubble in which "IS THIS WHERE I REALLY BELONG ...?" H – HAVE I BEEN REACHING FOR THE MOON? ”. As a result, the painting loses its former meaning and can now be interpreted differently.
Emergence
Like several of his works, Lichtenstein painted the picture from a comic panel by the American comic artist John Romita senior . First, he created a study about 15 cm × 15 cm with the comments "red dots" and "for Otto". In this case, structures were only made recognizable by contour drawings and painted in one color. The colors of the comic were rendered purer and brighter. Lichtenstein changed details until he was satisfied with the composition of the picture . In doing so, he removed the thought bubble, changed the hair color and shade of the face and added the characteristic hair band. He then enlarged the image in the projection and transferred it to the screen. He traced the outlines, again changing some details. Lichtenstein finally painted the picture with oil and acrylic on the white primed canvas. The face, neck and shoulders of the young woman were filled in with red grid points, the benday dots . These consist of red paint that has been brushed through a sieve onto the white primed canvas.
Classification in Lichtenstein's work
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Works that take up elements of the image |
Since 1961 Lichtenstein created paintings based on comics. The girl with a hair band was at the early end of this phase in 1965, when Lichtenstein was less likely to create comic-like works. The most important themes of this phase were love and war, which he staged as sterile and impersonal as possible. Accordingly, love is thematized in the present painting, which is supposed to appear industrially and impersonally through the use of excessively large benday dots . Lichtenstein also used the motif of the typical young woman in a number of his works. Based on comics, he mainly created close-ups of faces, such as the girl with a hairband .
Lichtenstein processed elements of the picture in later works. In the three-part surrealistic picture series “Mädchen mit Träne” (original title “Girl with Tear”) from 1977, a single strand of full hair and only half of the face remained. A tear is rolling from the remaining eye. The shoulder, which was indicated in the original by a quarter circle, is paradoxically transformed into a sphere. In the abstract lithograph “Blonde” from 1978, however, the entire head, albeit floating, can be seen in half profile. The view seems sadder, however, the picture has lost some of its color and the raster points have disappeared in favor of structured lines. Individual elements of the original image can also be recognized in later works, including the Brushstroke Head sculptures from 1987. The hair is now taken up as a brushstroke , and apart from the red kissable mouth and the benday dots, there is little reminiscent of it the original shape of the picture.
Plant history and reception
The painting was created at the end of Lichtenstein's cartoon period, which lasted from 1961 to 1965. At that time, Lichtenstein was already well known, if not undisputed. Its contemporary critics' main allegation was its lack of originality. This theme was taken up by appropriation art artist Elaine Sturtevant , who painted a copy of Girl with Hair Ribbon in 1967 . She called her work Lichtenstein Girl with Hair Ribbon .
Lichtenstein's painting was the last major work of the early and mid-1960s that Lichtenstein still owned in the 1990s. It was exhibited in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC . While Lichtenstein was still speaking in January 1993 that the painting was not for sale, in March of the same year he made agreements with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and sold the painting, which was valued at around 1.5 to 2.5 million US dollars Dollar was valued, finally in November 1994 for the sizeable cost of $ 6 million to Japan . The purchase of the work was among the purchases of around 500 major works (including Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe from 1967). The museum, which only opened in 1995, wanted to wind this up without attracting much attention. However, due to the high price and Lichtenstein's previous statements that the painting was unsaleable, the sale aroused attention, confusion and astonishment in both America and Japan.
The girl with a hair band is presented in several films, including a .:
- 1000 Masterpieces - American Painting of the 1950s and 60s. Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997): Mädchen mit Haarband - Girl with hair ribbon, 1965. Arthaus Musik GmbH, DVD edition Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-939873-82-9 (online: a b )
- Roy Lichtenstein, Melvyn Bragg , Chris Hunt: Roy Lichtenstein . RM Arts, Iambic Productions, London Weekend Television South Bank Show production. Phaidon, London, 1995, ISBN 0-7148-6019-0 ( youtube.com )
literature
- Elizabeth Clegg, Thomas Kellein and others; Wibke von Bonin (Hrsg.): Hundred masterpieces from the great museums of the world , volume 4. Verlagsgesellschaft Schulfernsehen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8025-2180-3 . (Row of the National Gallery of Art , Washington.)
Individual evidence
- ^ Lichtensteins in Museums. ASIA and AUSTRALIA. (No longer available online.) In: image-duplicator.com. Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, archived from the original on June 6, 2013 ; accessed on February 14, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b David Barsalou: GIRL WITH HAIR RIBBON. DECONSTRUCTING ROY LICHTENSTEIN. 2000, accessed February 9, 2012 .
- ↑ Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-9135-5 , p. 31 .
- ^ Roy Lichtenstein: Girl with Hair Ribbon. Image duplicator. In: image-duplicator.com. Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, accessed February 9, 2012 .
- ↑ a b c d e f Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Image Duplicator
- ↑ James O. Young: Cultural appropriation and the arts. Blackwell, Malden 2008, ISBN 978-1-4051-7656-9 , pp. 65-67.
- ↑ Asiaweek . tape 21 , no. 1-13 , 1995.
- ↑ Andrew Decker: The $ 6-million girl . In: New York . tape 27 , no. 44 , November 7, 1994, pp. 23 (English, books.google.de [accessed February 9, 2012]).
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