Together with other leading American Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein (1923 - 1997) turned to popular culture at the beginning of the 1960s, when he began to use typical elements of commercial advertising and comics in his paintings.

In one of his first solo exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York in 1961, he was showing works in his typical, perennial style of comic-strip imagery, using rigid black outlines and Benday-dot grounds, speech balloons and lettering, in order to eliminate any trace of the artist’s hand, but referring to the means of mass production and mass iconography. In a general way, Lichtenstein chose subjects of various contexts for his works. Many of these deal with the stereotyped ideas of action and technical power as represented in comic-strips. Others are quotations or simplified interpretations of earlier art styles, such as the fragmentary images of the brushstroke gesture in Abstract Expressionism shown in the series Brushstroke, or references to Cubism, Rayonism and works of important painters of those periods.

He also referred to the genres of still-life, landscape and interior, but one of his most famous and often varied subjects, is found in the reference to trivialized emotions, evident in the close-up portraits of young girls making expressive gestures, with dramatic expressions on their faces.

The Crying Girl of 1963 in The UBS Art Collection is a rare, early, ink on paper drawing which was made as a sketch for later use. The drawing is related to a colored series of works based on the same image, using clear, contrasting colors of red, yellow and blue, combined with black outlines, while white is used for the background or to create lighting effects. Crying Girl is a typical example of works which show a girl with a dramatic and tearful expression on her face, biting her fingers. Striking in his pictorial comment, Lichtenstein appeals to the trivialized emotions as they appear in a variety of everyday imagery. In addition to this important paper work, The UBS Art Collection also contains works of the other Lichtenstein series mentioned here.

Reference:

Lawrence Alloway, Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983