Name: Vicki! I Thought Heard Your Voice
Brand: Roy Lichtenstein
Rating: 4.9 (183 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

Roy Lichtenstein’s Vicki! I Thought I Heard Your Voice from 1964 is a quintessential piece of Pop Art. Seeking a truly mechanical printing method, the artist found himself thoroughly inspired by industrial New York street and subway signs. As a result, he produced Vicki! as a signed and limited edition of 8 porcelain enamels on steel.

Vicki! I Thought I Heard Your Voice is a quintessential piece of Pop Art. Seeking a truly mechanical printing method, the artist found himself thoroughly inspired by industrial New York street and subway signs. As a result, he rendered Vicki! I Thought I Heard Your Voice in porcelain enamel on steel.

In line with Drowning Girl, Vicki! presents a single square comic strip panel. The work portrays one of Lichtenstein’s earliest melodramatic cartoon heroines. In the print’s dotted foreground, a male character, all suited up, is blocking a doorway with his back to the beholder. A defiant looking blonde woman with red lips stands in front of him, her gaze unfazed by his pretend surprise at her arrival. The title of the artwork corresponds to the text in the speech bubble above the man’s head.

Scaled dramatically and cropped up close, Vicki!’s captivating frame represents a major advancement in colour, form, composition, and narrative. Similar to Crying Girl and Blonde Waiting of the same period, the work is highly charged with content, yet coolly represented through the means of mass-printing. Vicki! I Thought I Heard Your Voice is essentially a sardonic riff on gender politics and the misrepresentation of femininity in commercial culture and art history.