拍品专文
This work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. The work will be catalogued as Untitled (Girl in Water) [film Joanna], 1968.
Roy Lichtenstein created Girl in Water in 1968, and indeed this work clearly embodies the aesthetic of the era, yet also taps into the more timeless issues that so concerned the artist: beauty, vision and representation itself. This picture dates from one of the great pinnacles of Pop Art, when the artists associated with that nebulous grouping had taken the world by storm, their works instantly recognisable. Indeed, in 1968 Lichtenstein's pictures were twice used as covers for Time magazine, and he was granted an exhibition at the Tate, London, the first devoted by that institution to a living American artist, revealing the impact that Pop had already created on the world at large. Girl in Water's own Pop credentials are established in the image's links to a dream sequence in Michael Sarne's movie from the same year, Joanna, which starred Geneviève Waïte as the eponymous character, an ingénue exposed to the decadence of London living and the Swinging Sixties and featuring Donald Sutherland, Calvin Lockhart and Michael Chow in supporting roles. Mr. Chow, the London restaurant which has now expanded through the United States, opened the following year and still features the tribute "Chicken Joanna" on its menus. Lichtenstein even designed a poster for the film featuring one of his sunsets, but in Girl in Water, he has taken this fragment of Pop culture of that moment, as the inspiration for an exploration of timeless and contemporary notions of female beauty.
The poetic, melancholy aspect of Girl in Water, which is thrown into relief by the style in which the picture has been rendered, clearly echoes Drowning Girl, which Lichtenstein painted in 1963. Similarly, this is a quintessentially 60s image, yet one which invokes questions of aesthetics and artifice while tapping into a range of references from "High" as well as popular culture. In depicting this beautiful woman in the water, Lichtenstein has deliberately invoked a range of references including ancient art, Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha, Shakespeare's Ophelia and indeed John William Waterhouse's depiction of Nymphs in water. There is a lyrical, romantic beauty to this haunting image that evokes both the classical and Art Nouveaux, yet is emphatically and therefore perversely anchored in Lichtenstein's deliberately faux-industrial aesthetic. Varying concepts of female beauty were of increasing interest to Lichtenstein, ever the enthusiastic investigator of optical constructs, and this was especially true of this period, as is evidenced by the sheer variety of depiction - from his comic-strip heroines to the crisp classical cameo of Diana of 1965. "The kind [of women] I paint are really made of black lines and red dots," he told David Sylvester.
"I see it that abstractly. It's very hard for me to fall for one of these creatures, because they're not really reality to me. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have a clichéd ideal, a fantasy ideal, of a woman that I would be interested in. But I think I have in mind what they should look like for other people" (Lichtenstein, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 227).
Thus, Lichtenstein has invoked this Platonic ideal, this "cliché," yet he has done so using an aesthetic that mimics mass print and the media: the means of production, and therefore the artificiality, of this picture are on plain, even perverse, display. Lichtenstein has revelled in dismantling the suspension of disbelief with which we, as viewers, look at reproduced images by using techniques such as Benday dots and collage. Indeed, he has emphasised their use: the hair has been rendered in curling ribbons of black and white which echo Lichtenstein's Brushstroke paintings of the same period, while the wisp of cloud has been created by cutting out a section of the dotted sheet laid down to represent, through the medium of black dots, the sky. In Girl in Water, the artist has thus playfully exploited and pushed to the level of absurdity the visual reflexes by which we can look, for instance, at an expanse of sheet left in reserve and "read" it as clouds or a girl's face and shoulders. Lichtenstein was fascinated by the short-hand with which advertisers and illustrators could conjure a sense of beauty into being through what is effectively short-hand and indeed sleight-of-hand:
"I can realize that, when I was a child and I looked at the comic books, these women were really convincing. I really thought these were very beautiful women. Now I see the drawing in it and they don't look that way to me. I mean, you could really have a love affair with these women as a child, and now these don't mean that to me in the originals, in the comic books" (Lichtenstein, quoted in ibid., p. 228).
Only the year before he made Girl in Water, Lichtenstein said to John Coplans that he was more and more fascinated by the highly confectioned women of the day, saying of their carefully controlled image that, "it's another kind of unreality," before elaborating:
"Women draw themselves this way - that is what makeup really is. They put their lips on in a certain shape and do their hair to resemble a certain ideal. There is an interaction there that is very intriguing" (Lichtenstein, quoted in John Coplans, "Talking with Roy Lichtenstein," pp.198-202, S.H. Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley & London, 1997, p. 202).
Lichtenstein, then, in painting this woman with her elaborate hair-do, has managed not only to channel the tastes of his era, but also to create a picture that is itself concerned with the ways in which humanity uses optical illusions, visual tricks germane to those at work in Girl in Water itself, in order to manipulate perception every day. In this context, the make-up and hairstyles he mentions are forms of artificial image in their own rights, and therefore distant relatives to the act of painting. The woman in Girl in Water perfectly encapsulates Lichtenstein's interest in the artificial representation of beauty both through the means of depiction and through the image content itself.
In Girl in Water, Lichtenstein has created an enchanting image, yet its very hold over the viewer is a result of his deliberate manipulation of anthropology, visual language and art history. The subject is far from arbitrary: its own intrinsic beauty highlights the trickery that lies behind so much art, and it is this unbridgeable gap between reality and representation that Lichtenstein so revels in illustrating. "I'm never drawing the object itself," he explained. "I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it" (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, pp. 118-19).
Roy Lichtenstein created Girl in Water in 1968, and indeed this work clearly embodies the aesthetic of the era, yet also taps into the more timeless issues that so concerned the artist: beauty, vision and representation itself. This picture dates from one of the great pinnacles of Pop Art, when the artists associated with that nebulous grouping had taken the world by storm, their works instantly recognisable. Indeed, in 1968 Lichtenstein's pictures were twice used as covers for Time magazine, and he was granted an exhibition at the Tate, London, the first devoted by that institution to a living American artist, revealing the impact that Pop had already created on the world at large. Girl in Water's own Pop credentials are established in the image's links to a dream sequence in Michael Sarne's movie from the same year, Joanna, which starred Geneviève Waïte as the eponymous character, an ingénue exposed to the decadence of London living and the Swinging Sixties and featuring Donald Sutherland, Calvin Lockhart and Michael Chow in supporting roles. Mr. Chow, the London restaurant which has now expanded through the United States, opened the following year and still features the tribute "Chicken Joanna" on its menus. Lichtenstein even designed a poster for the film featuring one of his sunsets, but in Girl in Water, he has taken this fragment of Pop culture of that moment, as the inspiration for an exploration of timeless and contemporary notions of female beauty.
The poetic, melancholy aspect of Girl in Water, which is thrown into relief by the style in which the picture has been rendered, clearly echoes Drowning Girl, which Lichtenstein painted in 1963. Similarly, this is a quintessentially 60s image, yet one which invokes questions of aesthetics and artifice while tapping into a range of references from "High" as well as popular culture. In depicting this beautiful woman in the water, Lichtenstein has deliberately invoked a range of references including ancient art, Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha, Shakespeare's Ophelia and indeed John William Waterhouse's depiction of Nymphs in water. There is a lyrical, romantic beauty to this haunting image that evokes both the classical and Art Nouveaux, yet is emphatically and therefore perversely anchored in Lichtenstein's deliberately faux-industrial aesthetic. Varying concepts of female beauty were of increasing interest to Lichtenstein, ever the enthusiastic investigator of optical constructs, and this was especially true of this period, as is evidenced by the sheer variety of depiction - from his comic-strip heroines to the crisp classical cameo of Diana of 1965. "The kind [of women] I paint are really made of black lines and red dots," he told David Sylvester.
"I see it that abstractly. It's very hard for me to fall for one of these creatures, because they're not really reality to me. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have a clichéd ideal, a fantasy ideal, of a woman that I would be interested in. But I think I have in mind what they should look like for other people" (Lichtenstein, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 227).
Thus, Lichtenstein has invoked this Platonic ideal, this "cliché," yet he has done so using an aesthetic that mimics mass print and the media: the means of production, and therefore the artificiality, of this picture are on plain, even perverse, display. Lichtenstein has revelled in dismantling the suspension of disbelief with which we, as viewers, look at reproduced images by using techniques such as Benday dots and collage. Indeed, he has emphasised their use: the hair has been rendered in curling ribbons of black and white which echo Lichtenstein's Brushstroke paintings of the same period, while the wisp of cloud has been created by cutting out a section of the dotted sheet laid down to represent, through the medium of black dots, the sky. In Girl in Water, the artist has thus playfully exploited and pushed to the level of absurdity the visual reflexes by which we can look, for instance, at an expanse of sheet left in reserve and "read" it as clouds or a girl's face and shoulders. Lichtenstein was fascinated by the short-hand with which advertisers and illustrators could conjure a sense of beauty into being through what is effectively short-hand and indeed sleight-of-hand:
"I can realize that, when I was a child and I looked at the comic books, these women were really convincing. I really thought these were very beautiful women. Now I see the drawing in it and they don't look that way to me. I mean, you could really have a love affair with these women as a child, and now these don't mean that to me in the originals, in the comic books" (Lichtenstein, quoted in ibid., p. 228).
Only the year before he made Girl in Water, Lichtenstein said to John Coplans that he was more and more fascinated by the highly confectioned women of the day, saying of their carefully controlled image that, "it's another kind of unreality," before elaborating:
"Women draw themselves this way - that is what makeup really is. They put their lips on in a certain shape and do their hair to resemble a certain ideal. There is an interaction there that is very intriguing" (Lichtenstein, quoted in John Coplans, "Talking with Roy Lichtenstein," pp.198-202, S.H. Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley & London, 1997, p. 202).
Lichtenstein, then, in painting this woman with her elaborate hair-do, has managed not only to channel the tastes of his era, but also to create a picture that is itself concerned with the ways in which humanity uses optical illusions, visual tricks germane to those at work in Girl in Water itself, in order to manipulate perception every day. In this context, the make-up and hairstyles he mentions are forms of artificial image in their own rights, and therefore distant relatives to the act of painting. The woman in Girl in Water perfectly encapsulates Lichtenstein's interest in the artificial representation of beauty both through the means of depiction and through the image content itself.
In Girl in Water, Lichtenstein has created an enchanting image, yet its very hold over the viewer is a result of his deliberate manipulation of anthropology, visual language and art history. The subject is far from arbitrary: its own intrinsic beauty highlights the trickery that lies behind so much art, and it is this unbridgeable gap between reality and representation that Lichtenstein so revels in illustrating. "I'm never drawing the object itself," he explained. "I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it" (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, pp. 118-19).