Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude 2 (1961)
Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl With Ball (1961)
During the early 1960s, the pop art movement had started taking shape. Artists Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein explored the human form and way of life through their works. The pop art movement originated in England during the early 1950s and emerged in America towards the late 1950s. The popular culture displayed within pop art is cartoonish and produced many well-known artists such as Andy Warhol and Peter Phillips. The era was tinged with funky artwork and playful pieces. Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude Number 2 and Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl With Ball, both created in 1961, explore women’s figures and sexuality.
Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude Number 2 is a work with harsh colors, hyper realistic patterns, and minimalistic features that makes a statement about women in general. The woman lying on the bed lacks facial features and any definition besides the features that indicate that she is a woman. The lack of depth paralleled by the hyper-realistic view outside the window implies that the woman is two dimensional and useless beyond her femininity. The room is filled with primary colors, from the blue bed, the red sheets and walls, to the shocking yellow hair of the woman. The bold colors contrast the muted pink of the woman, also a representative of her womanhood. The lack of light induced shadow creates an illusion of a two-dimensional world inside the bedroom, which can be contrasted to the world outside the window. The painting seems to imply that women should not be viewed as the center of anyone’s world since there is an adventure waiting just outside their window.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl With Ball, like Wesselmann’s work, seems to be very cartoonish. Unlike the previous work, the woman has a defined face and figure. She is clothed, but she seems to be on the beach. The intense, vibrant colors, consisting again of primary colors, aren’t shaded or shadowed which gives the painting the cartoon-like feeling. The woman is catching a ball, but she is in such an unnatural position that she looks just as plastic as the beach ball she is playing with. The unnatural position she’s in paired with the odd expression she holds resembles that of a doll. The message is similar in this painting: women have become so sexualized that they are no longer anything greater than their womanhood and femininity.
Both paintings explore the depth of the female form and sexuality through the use of brash colors and physical features, or lack thereof. The lack of shadow creates a cartoonish vibe, reminiscent of the pop age of which the paintings were created. They use facelessness and plasticity to represent the way in which women have become overly sexualized. The depth of the paintings, despite initially seeming extremely shallow, extends far beyond simple lines and primary colors.
