A New Yorker magazine cover proposal by Garrett Price follows a contemporary art movement downstream into art school. The widespread appropriation of comic book and comic strip characters onto the canvasses and smocks of art students shows the massive influence of the Pop Art movement. As a practical matter, Price probably couldn't have expected to get an image of Dagwood Bumstead or Mickey Mouse onto the cover of The New Yorker in the 1960s. Even if he did, the idea of getting the name Phlembrant past the editorial eye of William Shawn was simply preposterous.
Garrett Price's signature
Verso
Pop Art: Garrett Price Proposed New Yorker Cover Art eBay Listing Ended March 26, 2017
David Barsalou's image showing Roy Lichtenstein's source material for Sleeping Girl, Tony Abruzzo's panel from the December 1964 issue of DC Comic's Girls' Romances.
Another extremely helpful image from David Barsalou--as if you couldn't tell--allowing comparison of Roy Lichtenstein's painting, right, with Tony Abruzzo's original comic book panel, left
Sleeping Girl from 1964 is one of Roy Lichtenstein's classic "girl" paintings. It sold for an impressive $44.8 million dollars on May 9, a sales record for the artist. I saw the work on display at Sotheby's New York about ten days before the Contemporary Art Evening Auction, and it is quite striking. It is big without being too big. It is everything one wants to see in a painting by Roy Lichtenstein.
Lichtenstein's source was a panel of a weeping, blonde woman from a romance comic book illustrated by Tony Abruzzo. The story title was "Don't Kiss Me Again!" Some of the changes Lichtenstein made seem trivial. The woman is shown sleeping rather than crying. Her hand, which was there to wipe away tears, has been removed from the panel, and much of the emotional content has been removed as well. Our subject is now just a pretty face, big and blonde and beautiful.
Lichtenstein intensifies the image by ratcheting up the scale. He adds that bold, acid yellow hair and the many dots which are meant to suggest the look of print in comic books, but which certainly are anything but a slavish reproduction of printing techniques. Up close the dots really seem to be following their own design rules, but from a distance or in a reproduction the painting can seem to be a fair approximation of a comic book panel.
My favorite quotation by Roy Lichtenstein concludes an excellent article that appeared in The New York Times on March 31, 1995 when the artist was 71. The article had been part of a series in which the writer accompanies an artist to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The longish title was "AT THE MET WITH: Roy Lichtenstein; Disciple Of Color And Line, Master Of Irony" by Michael Kimmelman.
"I don't think artists like myself, and Ellsworth [Kelly], have the faintest idea what we're doing, in fact; but we try to put it in words that sound logical," he adds, mischievously. "Actually, I think I do know what I'm doing. But no other artist does."
Fig. 8. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite,
copy after an original of the 2nd century BC,
the mattress is an addition by Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Photo: Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library
DC Comics Girls' Romances, No. 105, December 1964 with "Don't Kiss Me Again!" The source material by Tony Abruzzo for Roy Lichtenstein's Sleeping Girl appears in this story.
