ROY LICHTENSTEIN SHIPBOARD GIRL

As you look at the artwork by Pop Art star Roy Lichtenstein, a theme begins to emerge: women. Comic book women of the 1960s with the classic blonde hair and red lips. They are anonymous, beautiful and often unhappily bothered by men.

Some art historians argue these paintings were a result of the abundance of romance comics being produced at the time. The comics were attempting to show women how to act in the new, ‘modern’ world. In the 1960s, divorce rates were higher, there were more women in the workplace and women were more liberated than ever before. It was a new world of dating, love and rebellion.

Roy Lichtenstein’s renderings of these comic books plucked out the most stereotypical of female images (crying, thinking about boys) or images of women asserting their independence. After all, as Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, remarks in an interview, “Roy adored women.” 

Roy Lichtenstein’s artwork exemplifies Pop Art’s rich and complex relationship with consumer culture and social change during the electric decade of the 1960s. His paintings are alive to contemporary obsessions with youth and beauty, the tyranny of consumer objects, and the intense emotional drama of advertising and the mass media.

Shipboard Girl  (1965) by Roy Lichtenstein is an Offset lithograph. Shipboard Girl is referenced in Corlett II.6 and is hand signed. None were numbered. For more information about Shipboard Girl or Roy Lichtenstein, please contact the gallery. Call for Value