Golf Ball

Golf Ball (sometimes Golfball) is a 1962 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is considered to fall within the art movement known as Pop art. It depicts "a single sphere with patterned, variously directional semi-circular grooves."[1] The work is commonly associated with black-and-white Piet Mondrian works. It is one of the works that was presented at Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition and one that was critical to his early association with pop art. The work is commonly critiqued for its tension involving a three-dimensional representation in two dimensions with much discussion revolving around the choice of a background nearly without any perspective.

This article is about the Roy Lichtenstein painting. For the sporting good, see golf ball.

Golf Ball
ArtistRoy Lichtenstein
Year1962 (1962)
MovementPop art
Dimensions81.3 cm × 81.3 cm (32.0 in × 32.0 in)
LocationPrivate collection

History

When Lichtenstein had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in February 1962, it sold out before opening.[2] Golf Ball was one of the works that Lichtenstein exhibited.[3] Later, Lichtenstein included Golf Ball in Still Life with Goldfish Bowl, 1972, and Go for Baroque, 1979.[4] The painting exemplifies the novel superimposition of abstraction and figuration.[5] The work also represents abstraction as a result of elimination of three-dimensionality, chiaroscuro and a landscape context.[6]

Golf Ball is said to reflect the black and white elements of Compositions in Black and White, 1917, Piet Mondrian.

The use of black and white is regarded as dramatic, and although it may have been influenced by 1940s and 1950s works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, it is more likely a commentary on Mondrian's 1917 Composition in Black and White.[7] Alternatively, it may have been a reference to another of Mondrian's Pre-World War I black and white oval paintings, such as Pier and ocean, 1915.[8] This complementary source art was common of Lichtenstein's 1960s work on frequently advertised objects.[7] Lichtenstein describes his sources as Mondrian Plus and Minus paintings.[9]

Description

In 1962, Lichtenstein produced several works in which he depicted "...the repetitive regularity of their patterned surfaces..."[10] Golf Ball is a depiction of a golf ball using a Mondrianesque set of black and white arcs to depict the three-dimensionality of the subject. However, the neutral background manipulates the image and diminishes the volumetric characteristics by stripping the viewer of his perspective.[11] It is described as a "pure graphic mark on a gray ground" as well as a "totality of abstract marks."[5] Lichtenstein described Golf Ball as "the antithesis of what was thought of as having 'art meaning'" because of its lack of perspective.[9]

Golf Ball is an example of the emerging "confident authority" of his single-image paintings with its "Rock of Gibraltar-like thereness".[12] The "frontal and centralized presentation"'s directness lacked the sophistication to market the images of household goods for advertising but was considered daring artistically.[13] The black and white painting on a grey background challenges both the natural perception of realism and the boundaries of abstraction.[14] The work "gives us both the impression of space and the fact of surface".[15]

Golf Ball was one of the bases by which "critics aligned him with other practitioners of Pop Art", although much is made about the painting's references to abstract painting, especially its likeness to Mondrian's works. Furthermore, the painting leverages tensions regarding three-dimensional representation in two dimensions resulting from spatial ambiguities caused by the lack of cues in the background.[16]

Reception

Diane Waldman refers to the subject of Golf Ball as a freestanding form.[17] This is one of the figures in which Lichtenstein demonstrates his draftsman experience.[18] This work demonstrated his maturation as an artist with standardized contours that present uniformity and solidified inflections.[12] This is a strong example of presenting the tension of volumetric potential balanced against two-dimensional presentation.[19] It also shows how placement against a neutral background diminishes three-dimensionality.[20] Despite Lichtenstein's techniques to display/minimize dimensionality, the viewer imposes his or her own visualization experiences on the painting, which minimizes the effect of spatial illusion.[21]

See also

Notes
  1. Lippard, Lucy R. (1970). "New York Pop". Pop Art (third printing ed.). Praeger Publishers. p. 125.
  2. Tomkins, Calvin (1988). Roy Lichtenstein: Mural With Blue Brushstroke. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 25. ISBN 0-8109-2356-4. His first show at Castelli's, in February 1962, was sold out before the opening.
  3. Madoff, Steven Henry, ed. (1997). "Focus: The Major Artists". Pop Art: A Critical History. University of California Press. p. 198. ISBN 0-520-21018-2. Yes. The first show was very diverse.
  4. Waldman 1993, Still Lifes: 1972–76, pp. 206–7, 216–7
  5. Mercurio, Gianni (2010). Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations 0n Art. SKIRA. p. 60. ISBN 978-88-572-0460-4. Good examples of just how abstraction and figuration were superimposed to propose fresh solutions are Lichtenstein's Golf Ball (1962) and Ball of Twine (1963).
  6. Mercurio, Gianni (2010). Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations 0n Art. SKIRA. p. 61. ISBN 978-88-572-0460-4. Golf Ball and Ball of Twine highlight how the more an image is synthesized by eliminating its three-dimensionality, chiaroscuro and a landscape context, the more it takes on the characteristics of abstraction.)
  7. Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 29-31 "Lichtenstein's dramatic use of black and white is also a feature of subsequent paintings such as Golf Ball, 1962 ...
  8. Hendrickson 1993, The Pictures That Lichtenstein made Famous, or The Pictures that Made Lichtenstein Famous, pp. 25–26 For someone familiar with modern art, the formally related oval paintings of Piet Mondrian from before the First World War (Ill. p. 26) may come to mind.
  9. Lichtenstein, Roy (2009). "A Review of My Work Since 1961—A Slide Presentation". In Bader, Graham (ed.). Roy Lichtenstein: October Files. The MIT Press. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-262-51231-2. Golf Ball (1962), a painting of a single object, is intended to remind one of a Mondrian Plus and Minus painting.
  10. Hendrickson1993, The Pictures That Lichtenstein made Famous, or The Pictures that Made Lichtenstein Famous, p. 46
  11. Waldman, Diane (1969). Roy Lichtenstein. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. p. 15. Golf Ball, 1962 is composed of a series of black and white arcs that form an abstract pattern reminiscent of Mondrian’s plus and minus system. At the same time, by means of their placement, these black and white lines conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object. But the placement of the golf ball on a neutral ground once again neutralizes the object as a volumetric form. This manipulation of the two and three dimensional is one that the artist obviously relishes for he returns to it repeatedly.
  12. Alloway, Lawrence (1983). Roy Lichtenstein. Abbeville Press. pp. 18–19. ISBN 0-89659-331-2. This is particularly evident in the single-image paintings, which take on a Rock of Gibraltar-like thereness, and in the paintings from war comics, which have a clarity and elaboration in advance of the comparatively constrained romance subjects.
  13. Livingstone, Marco (1990). Pop Art: A Continuing History. Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-3707-7. The frontal and centralized presentation employed by Lichtenstein in early pairings of domestic objects, such as Roto Broil and Electric Cord of 1961 and Golf Ball (1962), was of such assertive directness that it would have been dismissed in contemporary advertising as too crude and unsophisticated. In the context of painting, however, this projection of an image so as to be instantly apprehended as a whole – as a perceptual pattern or structure that in psychological terms would be labelled a Gestalt – was daring in its austere simplicity, anticipating the Minimalism of the mid 1960s.
  14. Foster, Hal (2010). Francis, Mark (ed.). Pop. Phaidon. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-7148-5663-6. A golf ball is a prime object of suburban banality, but here it also recalls the pristine plus-and-minus abstractions Mondrian painted forty-five years before.
  15. Foster, Hal (2010). Francis, Mark (ed.). Pop. Phaidon. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-7148-5663-6.
  16. Lobel, Michael (2003). "Pop according To Lichtenstein". In Holm, Michael Juul; Tøjner, Poul Erik; Caiger-Smith, Martin (eds.). Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. p. 84. ISBN 87-90029-85-2. ...it was through paintings like...Golf Ball...that critics aligned him with other practitioners of Pop Art...Many of his paintings of objects veer toward abstraction, whether Golf Ball's radiating fields of arcs enclosed within a circular form...In this way these works often make reference to the traditions of abstract painting.
  17. Waldman, Diane (1999). Roy Lichtenstein: Reflections. Electa. p. 25. ISBN 88-435-7287-3.
  18. Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 28 "Lichtenstein's experience as a draftsman is reflected in his spare presentation of kitchen stoves, washing machines, bathroom interiors, golf balls, ice cream sodas....
  19. Waldman 1993, Cliches into Icons: Early Pop Pictures, p. 33 "Both Black Flowers and Golf Ball are successful examples of this dialectic.
  20. Steven Henry, Madoff, ed. (1997). "Focus: The Major Artists". Pop Art: A Critical History. University of California Press. p. 208. ISBN 0-520-21018-2. At the same time, by means of their placement, the black and white lines conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object. But the placement of the golf ball on a neutral ground once again neutralizes the object as a volumetric form.
  21. Waldman 1993, Comic Strips and Advertising Images, p. 47 "We know that a golf ball is three-dimensional, and so most of us project the additional dimension onto such a two-dimensional image even though it may not be depicted in that manner."

References
  • Golf Ball at the Lichtenstein Foundation website
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