page_title: Drowning Girl
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Drowning Girl / Reception
context_page_description: Drowning Girl is a 1963 painting in oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein. 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.
context_section_description: Drowning Girl was painted at the apex of Lichtenstein's use of enlarged dots, cropping, and magnification of the original source. In 1993, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curator Diane Waldman noted that Lichtenstein made Drowning Girl a cornerstone of his career because of "his extraordinary sense of organization, his ability to use a sweeping curve and manipulate it into an allover pattern". According to the 2007 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, the work is "a mix of cliché, melodrama, pathos, and absurdity ..." In 1995, art scholar Jonathan Fineberg called it "a remarkably impassive style". The image is typical of Lichtenstein's depiction of comic subjects responding to a situation in a clichéd manner.
  Lichtenstein's tinkering with the source material resulted in a recomposition with sharper focus after he eliminated several elements that distract from the depiction of the woman, such as the capsized boat, troubled male subject and the general seascape. The result, Lanchner wrote, was swirling, swooping waves and "animate white foam" that envelope the subject with a "pictorial buoyancy" that form an "aquatic continuum".
  Drowning Girl presents an "unmistakeable acknowledgement to the flamboyant linearism of Art Nouveau". The waves are intended to "recall Hokusai as well as the biomorphic forms of Arp and Miró;" just as the source comics may have intended to.  Lichtenstein has claimed a strong relation between the original comic book source panel and Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, making this work a bridge between the two.  The adaptation of the wave print is said to add a decorative look and feel to the painting, without which the work might be much more alarming to the viewer. Lichtenstein even made the connection between Drowning Girl's arabesque waves and "the Art Nouveau aesthetic". Regarding this work, Lichtenstein stated:
  In the Drowning Girl the water is not only Art Nouveau, but it can also be seen as Hokusai. I don't do it just because it is  another reference. Cartooning itself sometimes resembles other periods in art – perhaps unknowingly ... They do things like the little Hokusai waves in the Drowning Girl. But the original wasn't very clear in this regard – why should it be? I saw it and then pushed it a little further until it was a reference that most people will get ... it is a way of crystallizing the style by exaggeration.
  Tøjner describes the work as "Lichtenstein's finest formulation of a counter-image to the many explosions in his universe", noting that the drama is past its peak although it may seem to be at a crescendo. He also notes that "the tears are drawn with classic Lichtenstein waxy fullness" despite the surrounding water, which must be significant since "naturalistic justification" is absent. A November 1963 Art Magazine review stated that this was one of the "broad and powerful paintings" of the 1963 exhibition at Castelli's Gallery. Nonetheless, the name of the work was not universally known.  In Art Magazine's review of his 1964 Castelli Gallery show, Lichtenstein was referred to as the author of I Don't Care, I'd Rather Sink (Drowning Girl). In 2005, Gary Garrels of the Museum of Modern Art wrote that the work is a "poetics of the utterly banal, of displaced ordinariness" resulting in an "image frozen in time and space", making it "iconic". Comparing this to the source, Garrels says it is a rendering "in a simplified vocabulary" produced while Lichtenstein put aside his mechanical objectivity. According to The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, extreme examples of his formalization become "virtual abstraction" when the viewer recalls that the motif is an element of a larger work. Thus, Lichtenstein reinforced a non-realist view of comic strips and advertisements, presenting them as artificial images with minimalistic graphic techniques. Lichtenstein's magnification of his source material stressed the plainness of his motifs as an equivalent to mechanical commercial drawing, leading to implications about his statements on modern industrial America. No
caption: Lichtenstein acknowledges that the wave is adapted from The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the famous woodblock print by Hokusai.[42]
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