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Golf Ball

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This article is about the Roy Lichtenstein painting. For the sporting good, see golf ball.

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Lua error in Module:Infobox at line 314: malformed pattern (missing ']'). Golf Ball (sometimes Golfball) is a 1962 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is considered to fall within the art movement known as Pop art. It depicts "a single sphere with patterned, variously directional semi-circular grooves."[1] The work is commonly associated with black-and-white Piet Mondrian works. It is one of the works that was presented at Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition and one that was critical to his early association with pop art. The work is commonly critiqued for its tension involving a three-dimensional representation in two dimensions with much discussion revolving around the choice of a background nearly without any perspective.

History

When Lichtenstein had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in February 1962, it sold out before opening.[2] Golf Ball was one of the works that Lichtenstein exhibited.[3] Later, Lichtenstein included Golf Ball in Still Life with Goldfish Bowl, 1972, and Go for Baroque, 1979.[4] The painting exemplifies the novel superimposition of abstraction and figuration.[5] The work also represents abstraction as a result of elimination of three-dimensionality, chiaroscuro and a landscape context.[6]

Golf Ball is said to reflect the black and white elements of Compositions in Black and White, 1917, Piet Mondrian.

The use of black and white is regarded as dramatic, and although it may have been influenced by 1940s and 1950s works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, it is more likely a commentary on Mondrian's 1917 Composition in Black and White.[7] Alternatively, it may have been a reference to another of Mondrian's Pre-World War I black and white oval paintings, such as Pier and ocean, 1915.[8] This complementary source art was common of Lichtenstein's 1960s work on frequently advertised objects.[7] Lichtenstein describes his sources as Mondrian Plus and Minus paintings.[9]

Description

Lichtenstein in 1967

In 1962, Lichtenstein produced several works in which he depicted "...the repetitive regularity of their patterned surfaces..."[10] Golf Ball is a depiction of a golf ball using a Mondrianesque set of black and white arcs to depict the three-dimensionality of the subject. However, the neutral background manipulates the image and diminishes the volumetric characteristics by stripping the viewer of his perspective.[11] It is described as a "pure graphic mark on a gray ground" as well as a "totality of abstract marks."[5] Lichtenstein described Golf Ball as "the antithesis of what was thought of as having 'art meaning'" because of its lack of perspective.[9]

Golf Ball is an example of the emerging "confident authority" of his single-image paintings with its "Rock of Gibraltar-like thereness".[12] The "frontal and centralized presentation"'s directness lacked the sophistication to market the images of household goods for advertising but was considered daring artistically.[13] The black and white painting on a grey background challenges both the natural perception of realism and the boundaries of abstraction.[14] The work "gives us both the impression of space and the fact of surface".[15]

Golf Ball was one of the bases by which "critics aligned him with other practitioners of Pop Art", although much is made about the painting's references to abstract painting, especially its likeness to Mondrian's works. Furthermore, the painting leverages tensions regarding three-dimensional representation in two dimensions resulting from spatial ambiguities caused by the lack of cues in the background.[16]

Reception

Diane Waldman refers to the subject of Golf Ball as a freestanding form.[17] This is one of the figures in which Lichtenstein demonstrates his draftsman experience.[18] This work demonstrated his maturation as an artist with standardized contours that present uniformity and solidified inflections.[12] This is a strong example of presenting the tension of volumetric potential balanced against two-dimensional presentation.[19] It also shows how placement against a neutral background diminishes three-dimensionality.[20] Despite Lichtenstein's techniques to display/minimize dimensionality, the viewer imposes his or her own visualization experiences on the painting, which minimizes the effect of spatial illusion.[21]

See also

Notes

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References

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External links

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Waldman 1993, Still Lifes: 1972–76, pp. 206–7, 216–7
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 29-31 "Lichtenstein's dramatic use of black and white is also a feature of subsequent paintings such as Golf Ball, 1962, and may be related to the black-and-white paintings created by Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and others in the 1940s and 1950s. More to the point, perhaps, Lichtenstein chose this image to comment on the work of Mondrian (see fig. 32), which was of interest to him at the time. Here, Lichtenstein emulated Mondrian's reductive style and translated the Dutch artist's system of simple plus and minus forms into his own series of signs, breaking down the common object of a golf ball into a collection of hooked marks surrounded by a bold black outline."
  8. ↑ Hendrickson 1993, The Pictures That Lichtenstein made Famous, or The Pictures that Made Lichtenstein Famous, pp. 25–26 The small cusps and ellipses indicating the pores of its surface make it recognizable as a three-dimensional object, but they are also a play on abstract signs. For someone familiar with modern art, the formally related oval paintings of Piet Mondrian from before the First World War (Ill. p. 26) may come to mind. Yet there are also parallels with contemporary art. The simultaneous reduction of subject and inflation of scale in Golfball shares the humorous effect of Claes Oldenburg's sculputre.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Hendrickson1993, The Pictures That Lichtenstein made Famous, or The Pictures that Made Lichtenstein Famous, p. 46
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 28 "Lichtenstein's experience as a draftsman is reflected in his spare presentation of kitchen stoves, washing machines, bathroom interiors, golf balls, ice cream sodas, cherry pies, hot dogs, sneakers, socks, etc. and in his highly enlarged depictions of such domestic rituals as wiping, spraying, and sponging (see, for example, Golf Ball, Bathroom, Washing Machine, The Refrigerator, Spray, and Sponge II..."
  19. ↑ Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 33 "Both Black Flowers and Golf Ball are successful examples of this dialectic. In Black Flowers, the artist unified his imagery by means of the Benday-dot screen, whereas in Golf Ball bare areas of canvas unite figure and field. This ambiguity between two-dimensional and three-dimensional is one that he obviously relishes, for he has returned to it repeatedly."
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Waldman 1993, Comic Strips and Advertising Images, p. 47 "Single-object paintings such as Golf Ball (fig. 31), 1962, suggest spatial illusion largely by virtue of their subject. We know that a galf ball is three-dimensional, and so most of us project the additional dimension onto such a two-dimensional image even though it may not be depicted in that manner. We bring to the image our knowledge of the object as an entity that occupies a particular, concrete space."
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