Crying Girl

By its very nature, printmaking occupies a realm halfway between mass-produced, commercial imagery and painting or drawing, producing as it does multiple original works in several stages, each touched by the artist, the printer, and the printing press itself. Pop artists embraced modern printmaking techniques with enthusiasm, as they were eager to incorporate into their works of art aspects of the real world of popular and consumer culture. Crying Girl exemplifies Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s subject matter and graphic style. Drawing on the easy entertainment value of the daily comic strip, he created a bold and unforgettable image that uses commercial art’s simplified colors, its mechanical lines and benday dots, and its mood of frozen melodrama. In the 1960s Lichtenstein’s paintings and prints captured the spirit of the new age of mass media, contrasting tormented tabloid lovers, exploding wartime bomber planes, and the hard-sell housewives of American advertising with a cool and detached sensibility that countered the unbridled optimism and turbulent social changes of the postwar years. Although Pop artists seemed to embrace the burgeoning growth and materialism of the new consumer culture, their relationship to it is best understood through a filter of irony and even skepticism.