Drowning Girl is a 1963 American painting in oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein, based on original art by Tony Abruzzo. The painting is considered among Lichtenstein's most significant works, perhaps on a par with his acclaimed 1963 diptych Whaam!. One of the most representative paintings of the pop art movement, Drowning Girl was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1971.
The painting has been described as a "masterpiece of melodrama", and is one of the artist's earliest images depicting women in tragic situations, a theme to which he often returned in the mid-1960s. It shows a teary-eyed woman on a turbulent sea. She is emotionally distressed, seemingly from a romance. Using the conventions of comic book art, a thought bubble reads: "I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink — Than Call Brad For Help!" This narrative element highlights the clichéd melodrama, while its graphics — including Ben-Day dots that echo the effect of the printing process — reiterate Lichtenstein's theme of painterly work that imitates mechanized reproduction. The work is derived from a 1962 DC Comics panel; both the graphical and narrative elements of the work are cropped from the source image. It also borrows from Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa and from elements of modernist artists Jean Arp and Joan Miró. It is one of several Lichtenstein works that mention a character named Brad who is absent from the picture.
Background
During the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of American painters began to adapt the imagery and motifs of comic strips. Roy Lichtenstein made drawings of comic strip characters in 1958. Andy Warhol produced his earliest paintings in the style in 1960. Lichtenstein, unaware of Warhol's work, produced Look Mickey and Popeye in 1961. Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to Campbell's Soup Cans as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Lichtenstein. He once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing."
Drowning Girl depicted the advancement of Lichtenstein's cartoon work, which represented his 1961 departure from his abstract expressionism period, from animated cartoons to more serious themes such as romance and wartime armed forces. Lichtenstein said that, at the time, "I was very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images." Lichtenstein parodied four Picassos between 1962 and 1963. Picasso's depictions of weeping women may have influenced Lichtenstein to produce portrayals of vulnerable teary-eyed women, such as the subjects of Hopeless and Drowning Girl. Another possible influence on his emphasis on depicting distressed women in the early- to mid-1960s was that his first marriage was dissolving at the time. Lichtenstein's first marriage to Isabel Wilson, which resulted in two sons, lasted from 1949 to 1965; the couple separated in 1963.
When Lichtenstein made his transition to comic-based work, he began to mimic the style while adapting the subject matter. He applied simplified color schemes and commercial printing-like techniques. The style he adopted was "simple, well-framed images solid fields of bold color often bounded by thick, stark border lines." The borrowed technique was "representing tonal variations with patterns of colored circles that imitated the half-tone screens of Ben-Day dots used in newspaper printing". PBS asserts that this is an adaptation of the ligne claire style associated with Hergé. Lichtenstein once said of his technique: "I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental."
The subject of Drowning Girl is an example of Lichtenstein's post-1963 comics-based women who "look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance, as if they all came out of the same pot of makeup." In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein produced several "fantasy drama" paintings of women in love affairs with domineering men causing women to be miserable, such as Drowning Girl, Hopeless and In the Car. These works served as prelude to 1964 paintings of innocent "girls next door" in a variety of tenuous emotional states. "In Hopeless and Drowning Girl, for example, the heroines appear as victims of unhappy love affairs, with one displaying helplessness ... and the other defiance (she would rather drown than ask for her lover's help)." Drowning Girl, the aforementioned works and Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... are among those tragedies that make the author a popular draw at museums.
History
Drowning Girl is derived from the splash page from "Run for Love!", illustrated by Tony Abruzzo and lettered by Ira Schnapp, in Secret Hearts #83 (November 1962), DC Comics. This is the same comic book issue that inspired Hopeless.
In 1963, Lichtenstein was parodying various types of sources such as commercial illustrations, comic imagery and even modern masterpieces. The masterpieces represented what could have been dubbed the "canon" of art and was thought of as "high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images. His masterworks sources included the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso. During this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." At the time, Lichtenstein was exploring the theme of "industrialization of emotion". In Lichtenstein's obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight said the work was "a witty rejoinder to De Kooning's famously brushy paintings of women". His comic romances often depicted stereotypical representations of thwarted passions. Although the Lichtenstein Foundation website claims that Lichtenstein did not begin using his opaque projector technique until the fall of 1963, Lichtenstein described his process for producing comics based art, including Drowning Girl:
When Lichtenstein had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in February 1962, it sold out before the opening. In addition to Drowning Girl, the exhibition included Look Mickey, Engagement Ring, Blam and The Refrigerator. The show ran from February 10 through March 3, 1962. According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, Drowning Girl was part of Lichtenstein's first exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles from April 1 – April 27, 1963, featuring Masterpiece, Portrait of Madame Cézanne and other works from 1962 and 1963. It was also part of his second solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery from September 28 – October 24, 1963 that included Torpedo...Los!, Baseball Manager, In the Car, Conversation, and Whaam!. Marketing materials for the show included the lithograph Crak! The Museum of Modern Art acquired Drowning Girl in 1971, and their webpage for this work credits Philip Johnson and Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright for the acquisition.
Description Some sources describe the subjects of Lichtenstein's tragic girls series as heroines (in the sense that they are the counterparts to the heroes), and others do not (in the sense that they are not heroic). Drowning Girl is a painting of a female subject who would prefer to give in to the power of the ocean than call for aid. Lichtenstein's version of the scene eliminates everything but the sea and a few body parts of the subject: her head, shoulder and hand, which are barely above the water. As her face is presented her eyes are shut with drops of what appear to be tears flowing from them. Because Lichtenstein only presents a single frame, the viewer does not know what happened before this moment and what is going to happen after it. Furthermore, the viewer has no way to know who Brad is and why she is so reluctant to call him.
According to The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, the most important element of Lichtenstein's procedure in the early 1960s was "the enlargement and unification of his source material". Although, according to some sources, the changes made to produce Drowning Girl are not regarded as significant,. Lichtenstein made several notable changes from the original source: "In the original illustration, the drowning girl's boyfriend appears in the background, clinging to a capsized boat. Lichtenstein cropped the image dramatically, showing the girl alone and encircled by a threatening wave. He changed the caption from 'I don't care if I have a cramp!' to 'I don't care!' and the boyfriend's name from Mal to Brad." With the former narrative change, Lichtenstein removed evidence that the drowning girl has a cramp in her leg. With the latter narrative change, Lichtenstein attempted to change the perception of the boyfriend. When discussing another work (I Know...Brad), Lichtenstein stated that the name Brad sounded heroic to him and was used with the aim of clichéd oversimplification.
Lichtenstein's method entailed "strengthening of the formal aspects of the composition, a stylization of motif, and a 'freezing' of both emotion and actions". Although comic-book panels depict a moment in time, Drowning Girl is borrowed from an example of a comic-book panel depiction of a moment relatively more "pregnant" with past- and future-dependent drama than most moments. This work also marks a phase in Lichtenstein's career when many of his works were given present-participial titles such as Sleeping Girl, Crying Girl and Blonde Waiting, which accentuates the works' "relation to process and action." According to The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, during this phase of Lichtenstein's career "a constant if restrained and a gentle sense of humor contribute just as much to the cheerful lightness of Lichtenstein's work as the balanced, completely harmonious composition."
Narrative content was in the forefront of much of Lichtenstein's work as a means to engage the viewer.. Measuring 171.6 cm × 169.5 cm (67.625 in × 66.75 in), Drowning Girl presents "a young woman who seems to have cried herself a river ... literally drowning in emotion," according to Janis Hendrickson. The melodrama makes it clear that she has been hurt by a "Brad", the name given to several of Lichtenstein's heroes. Vian Shamounki Borchert says that the caption makes it clear that the subject is practically "drowning in a sea of tears".
In typical Lichtenstein fashion, the tragic female is presented "in a suspended state of distress." According to Janis Hendrickson, the subject's head appears to rest on a wave as if it were a pillow and lies in the water as if it were a bed, creating a blend of "eroticism and final resting place". The waters of the sea swirl around the subject's waves of hair creating the perception of a whirlpool. The painting is representative of Lichtenstein's affinity for single-frame drama that reduces the viewer's ability to identify with it and that abstracts emotion. His use of industrial and mechanical appearance further trivialize the sentiments, although the painterly touches add to its simplification.
General context