Girl with Hair Ribbon

Girl with Hair Ribbon

Artist	Roy Lichtenstein
Year	1965
Medium	oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Dimensions	121.9 cm × 121.9 cm (48 in × 58 in)
Location	Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

Girl with Hair Ribbon Is a painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein from 1965.

The 48 "× 48" (121.9 cm × 121.9 cm) picture is in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Lichtenstein painted the painting after the panel of a comic book by John Romita^[1]. The painting is a typical work of American Pop Art and an example of abstract painting.

Description

The square painting shows a girl with hairbands; a young woman with slightly inclined head in half profile. Across her right shoulder she looks at the viewer with slightly lowered eyelids. At first glance, she seems distressed and imploring. On closer examination, however, their longing and seductive gaze is recognizable. Perhaps she is just flirting and wants to play with her red lips and the shoulder-length, blond hair, which she drops in the face despite the ribbon, in restraint and shyness. This coquettish restraint is expressed primarily by the position of the shoulder, which forms a barrier to the observer.

The colors of the hair - blue, red and white, which alternate with each other four times in wave lines, are repeated throughout the picture. The blue is redirected 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 opened mouth, and on the white eye skin.

Analysis

The picture shows how Lichtenstein plays with the viewer: On the one hand, he directs the viewer's attention to the idealized image of a delicate blonde, her face and her emotions. On the other hand, he makes the painting seem mechanical and cold. A closer look shows how abstract and artificial the representation is. The face consists of an area of the same red ben-day dots, empty areas represent shading. The eyes also consist of blue dots. The gold-blond hair is nothing more than a yellow surface penetrated by black contours. The shoulder is a quarter of a circle, separated by a black line, partly consisting of dots or white.

Comics were printed in the 1960s for cost reasons mostly with a reduced color palette or with coarse grid. Lichtenstein imitated this industrial production of images in offset printing using monochrome colors, which have no individuality and hide the traces of human painting. He thought that his picture was to be vehemently opposed to the observer, and to give the impression that it was not a question of substituting and deceiving. His conclusion was that what one believes to be an optical illusion is not what one sees. Thus Lichtenstein points out that what the viewer would like to see in paintings is not there anyway.

In his painting, Lichtenstein renounces the narrative framework of comics and tears the comics panel out of context. He also changed details in the panel and removed the bubble, which was in uppercase letters

"IS THIS WHERE I REALLY BELONG ...? HAVE I BEEN REACHING FOR THE MOON? ".

Thus, the painting loses its former meaning and can now be interpreted differently.

Development

Lichtenstein painted the painting like several of his works after a comic panel of the American comic book writer John Romita.^[2] He first produced a 15 cm x 15 cm study with the "red dots" and "for Otto" notes.^[3] In this case, structures were only identified by contour drawings and painted in a single-color area. The colors of the comics were rendered more pure and luminous. Details were changed by Lichtenstein, until he was satisfied with the picture composition. Here he removed the bubble, changed hair color and shading of the face, and added the characteristic hair color. He then enlarged the image in the projection and transferred it to the canvas. He sketched out the outlines, and again changing some details. Lichtenstein finally painted the painting with oil and acrylic on the white primed canvas. The face, neck and shoulder of the young woman were filled with red dots, the Benday Dots. These consist of a red color, which has been brushed through a screen onto the white primed canvas.

Sources

• Elizabeth Clegg, Thomas Kellein und Weitere; Wibke von Bonin (Hrsg.): Hundert Meisterwerke aus den großen Museen der Welt, Band 4. Verlagsgesellschaft Schulfernsehen, Köln 1988, ISBN 3-8025-2180-3. (Reihe der National Gallery of Art, Washington.)

References

External links

http://lichtensteinfoundation.org/image-database/

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.