In In the Car, how is the Details discussed?
After 1972, Lichtenstein's comics-based women "look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance, as if they all came out of the same pot of makeup." This particular example is one of several that is cropped so closely that the hair flows beyond the edges of the canvas.  As with most of his early romance comics, this consisted of "a boy and a girl" subject.  It is described as a tense, melodramatic graphic single-frame depiction of a romantic dialogue between a man and woman. Lichtenstein used horizontal parallel lines to convey the sense of motion. A November 1963 Art Magazine review stated that this was one of the "broad and powerful paintings" of the 1963 exhibition at Castelli's Gallery.In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein produced several "fantasy drama" paintings of women in love affairs with domineering men causing the women to be miserable, such as Drowning Girl, Hopeless and In the Car. These works served as prelude to 1964 paintings of innocent "girls next door" in a variety of tenuous emotional states.  "In the Car evokes a mood of resignation, with silence apparently prevailing as the woman stares stonily out the window."
Drowning Girl