“Crying Girl”
Roy Lichtenstein, Leo Castelli Gallery
Roy Lichtenstein: “Crying Girl” [exhibition mailer]. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1963. Original edition [unknown limitation]. Exhibition mailer folded into quarters for mailing (as issued). Color offset lithograph on wove paper. 17 x 23 -inch (43 x 58.2 cm) mailer published to promote the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, September 28 to October 24, 1963. Pinholes to all four corners. Yellow circular mailing tab split but attached. Quarter-inch closed tear to lower edge. Small thinned area under mailer address that does not affect artwork. Undated NYC metered (#543368) postal cancellation to address panel. A few small unobtrusive handling creases, not visible recto. Colors bright and attractive, no stains or foxing, so a very good example.
17 x 23 -inch (43 x 58.2 cm) mailer published to promote the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, September 28 to October 24, 1963. “This print/ mailer was published to announce Lichtenstein’s exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, September 28 - October 24, 1963, not in a numbered edition. The portion of the press run with the Castelli return address and exhibition information printed on the back was folded into quarters and mailed, while others without any printing on the back, usually signed by the artist, were sold or given away at Castelli Gallery during the exhibition. Printed on the verso of the mailer: Leo Castelli 4 East 77th, New York 21 along top edge of the upper left quadrant and Roy Lichtenstein September 28th to October 24th, 1963 along the bottom edge of the same quadrant. [...]” [Mary Lee Corlett, Ruth E. Fine, Roy Lichtenstein, The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1948–1997, New York 2002, p. 282 no. II.1]
“Crying Girl” was one of the (total of) seven prints for Lichtenstein’s three solo Castelli exhibitions from 1963 to 1965. Only two of the seven motifs (‘Crak!’ and ‘Brushstroke’) were printed in the usual manner as posters with the text announcing the exhibition on the front. Printed by Colorcraft, New York. Published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.
From the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation: Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923 – 1997) was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.
As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”
In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to the idea to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. But, as Lichtenstein said, “[I]t occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism.” Most famously, Lichtenstein appropriated the Benday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Lichtenstein may not have calibrated the depth of his breakthrough immediately but he did realize that the flat affect and deadpan presentation of the comic-strip panel blown up and reorganized in the Sherman-inflected way “was just so much more compelling”iv than the gestural abstraction he had been practicing.
Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey, which were swiftly followed by The Engagement Ring, Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg. Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Castelli was New York’s leading dealer in contemporary art, and he had staged landmark exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 and Frank Stella in 1960. Karp was immediately attracted to Lichtenstein’s paintings, but Castelli was slower to make a decision, partly on account of the paintings’ plebeian roots in commercial art, but also because, unknown to Lichtenstein, two other artists had recently come to his attention—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist—and Castelli was only ready for one of them. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, 1962. The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious. By the time of Lichtenstein’s second solo exhibition at Castelli in September 1963, his work had been showcased in museums and galleries around the country. He was usually grouped with Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Segal, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann. Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School.