POP ART
“A “founding father” of Pop Art” (Hendrickson, 2016), Roy Lichtenstein, is famous for his series of boldly- colored paintings which parodied comic strips and advertisements. Thanks to his works, he was recognised as a leader in the American art world. Hopeless, one of his paintings on miserable women, is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. It was finished by Lichtenstein in 1963. The idea was mainly ‘derived from a frame of "Run For Love!" in Secret Hearts, no. 83 by Tony Abruzzo’ (Wikipedia, n.d.).
Roy Lichtenstein, along with Andy Warhol, has created the Pop art movement, which ‘ended up Abstract Expressionism as the dominant style during the 60s’ (The Art Story, n.d.). In 1961, he had ‘not only discovered a new way of painting…show more content… “The heroine in this scene, similar to the young women depicted in Drowning Girl (1963) and Frightened Girl (1964), is consumed in a momentary, trivial love-related frustration.”(Francescadebiaso.blogspot.com, n.d.). Hopeless was painted with bright color, while Drowning Girl was created with almost black and white, even though both of them is about the girl who had an awful love story. In general, Hopeless is Lichtenstein’s painting on a crying girl, though It not only made us feel sympathize her sadness but also cheerful by the bright color. To create this painting, Lichtenstein applied technique which combined black outlines, flat areas of a severely limited range of colour, regular patterns of Benday dots and bold lettering. In addition, the colors such as yellow, red and blue, which are vivid, were mainly used by Lichtenstein as well as other Pop artists, referring to Pop culture. Different from other art movement, Pop art artworks were acrylic painting. The text of the comic book frame was compressed and located as an important visual element in order to shift the commercial aspects to “high” art (The Art Story, n.d.). In order to make the painting more dramatic and impressive, Lichtenstein did not use the same composition but he cropped the picture. “Lichtenstein enjoyed presenting the single-frame climax of a situation, since it reduced viewers’ ability to identify