Roy Lichtenstein Drowning Girl Essay

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Roy Lichtenstein was an American painter, and used female portraits based from American comic books to convey different type of emotions created by women. A few critics pointed out that comic books were an iconic object for the Pop art movement, and should not be disturbed. As a result, Lichtenstein enlarged comic book illustrations for a museum type of quality. In fact, if Lichtenstein would never have followed this path, romance and war comic books would never had gotten free publicity. The Pop Art movement allowed Lichtenstein to create stories that could be targeted to massive crowds. During the 60’s the artist created portraits of women using screenprint as a vehicle of his creations. Examining some of Lichtenstein’s work during this decade it is noticeable that he was trying to show the weak side of the female figure; In the other hand the artist might have attempted to …show more content…

According to Deborah Solomon from the New York Times, Roy Lichtenstein was a happily married men, but he got divorced from his wife Isabela Wilson during the 60’s. This separation of love affected the way the artist saw life, and since artwork is an expressive medium; Lichtenstein truly expressed himself with his paintings. The crying girl’s series show this reaction towards the fall of love in the artist’s life. This can be appreciated in one of his oil paintings “Drowning Girl” 1963, the subject was grabbed from a comic book strip; which subject matter was grabbed from a comic book strip. This made the audience only focus on the girl’s facial features, since it was a comic book story, Lichtenstein replaced the text of the helpless girl with selfish premises of death. In Lichtenstein words, he believes that ''I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me,'' it is hard to say if the artist was saying the truth. A good contrasting artist to this is Alexander McQueen a Scottish fashion designer, who would get inspired by personal experiences to create magnificent pieces

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