Crying Girl

During the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of American painters began to adapt the imagery and motifs of comic strips. Lichtenstein in 1958 made drawings of comic strip characters. Andy Warhol produced his earliest paintings in the style in 1960. Lichtenstein, unaware of Warhol's work, produced Look Mickey and Popeye in 1961. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein produced several "fantasy drama" paintings of women in love affairs with domineering men causing women to be miserable. These works served as prelude to 1964 paintings of innocent "girls next door" in a variety of tenuous emotional states. Picasso's depictions of weeping women may have influenced Lichtenstein to produce portrayals of vulnerable teary-eyed women. Another possible influence on his emphasis on depicting distressed women in the early to mid-1960s was that his first marriage was dissolving at the time. Lichtenstein's first marriage to Isabel Wilson, which resulted in two sons, lasted from 1949 to 1965. This work was adapted from a 1963 comic strip panel: Secret Hearts, no. 88 (June 1963) by DC Comics. It is considered to be one of Roy Lichtenstein's earliest attempts at producing enamel-on-steel works from the same type of comic-strip imagery he had already begun producing as conventional hand-painted canvases.