Why did Roy Lichtenstein paint 'Drowning Girl'?

Answer 1

Lichtenstein was famous as an artist in the sixties in what was known as the "pop" art movement that also featured the likes of Andy Warhol. Lichtenstein's most famous painting is of a WWII pilot about to crash his fighter. It's called Wham, and it has very much a comic book look about it. I'm sure his work is on line, and you can buy Wham as a poster along with Warhol's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.

He was important because he broke the boundary between the world of Art and the world of usual things in America, as Andy Warhol did and many artists. Rauschenberg started this process in American art. A quote which illustrates this attitude of Roy Liechtenstein:

- Well, it (Pop Art, fh) is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Paul Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art; it is utopian. It has had less and less to do with the world, it looks inward - neo Zen and all that. This is not so much a criticism as an obvious observation. Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different - another state of mind

* artist quotations from: 'What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' G. R. Swenson 'Art News' 67, November 1963, pp. 25-27 (art quote, Roy Lichtenstein)

Answer 2

He is famous because of his large-scale paintings and prints based on comic stips. He is a well-known American painter, sculptor and a graphic artist. His works are seen all over the newspaper during his time.

Answer 3

Its name was "Impression, soleil levant" (Impression Sunrise) and it gave the name to the movement.

Answer 4

Artists choose their subjects for reasons which are seldom known to others.

Answer 5

Because it suited his ideas.