Crying Girl (section)

A single frame lifted from a romance comic seems to fill your entire view, complete with a blonde woman wiping away her tears. Roy Lichtenstein created "Crying Girl" in the early 1960s, right as he was helping launch the Pop Art movement in America. The heavy black outlines, the flat pops of yellow and red, and those little colored dots all copy the look of cheap comic book printing. Those dots have a proper name, Ben-Day dots, and rather than let a machine make them, Lichtenstein carefully painted each one by hand to fake that mass-produced feel.

The joke and the genius sit side by side here. Lichtenstein pulled his images from throwaway sources like ads and pulpy romance comics, often zeroing in on women swept up in some emotional crisis. We never find out why this woman is sobbing, which leaves the whole scene hanging somewhere between sad and slightly funny. By blowing up a tiny printed panel to a huge scale and hanging it in a gallery, he poked at a big question that annoyed plenty of critics at the time: who gets to decide what counts as real art and what gets tossed aside as everyday trash?