Crying Girl
Crying Girl
Signed Ceramic
Roy Lichtenstein
117 x 117cm, Edition of 5, Enamel, 1964
£12,260,000-£18,020,000
$23,000,000-$33,810,000 Market Value Indicator
$22,880,000-$33,630,000 Market Value Indicator
¥111,420,000-¥163,770,000 Market Value Indicator
€14,280,000-€20,990,000 Market Value Indicator
$130,190,000-$191,350,000 Market Value Indicator
¥2,560,570,000-¥3,763,580,000 Market Value Indicator
$16,600,000-$24,400,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Crying Girl is a 1964 work by Roy Lichtenstein in porcelain enamel on steel, produced in a signed edition of five. The image shows a blonde woman in close-up, raising her hand to brush away a tear, rendered in deep blue outlines, yellow hair, red lips and a field of red Benday dots.
Lichtenstein based Crying Girl on a panel from the romance comic Secret Hearts (issue 88, 1963). He cropped tightly around the face and hand, removing any narrative context so that the moment of distress stands alone. The tear sits at the corner of one eye, the brows are drawn together, and the red mouth is slightly parted, while the yellow hair sweeps around her head in thick, curving bands.
The medium here is significant. Porcelain enamel on steel was an industrial process associated with signage, and by adopting it Lichtenstein pushed his imitation of mass production one step further, giving the image a hard, glossy and durable surface. Crying Girl is among his earliest enamels drawn from comic imagery, made at a time when the tearful heroine had become one of his most recognisable subjects. The work relates closely to his 1963 offset lithograph of the same title, and one example of the enamel has been in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum since 1965.
