Focus on Girl with Ball and explore the Reception.
The image and technique were regarded as unartistic. However, the painting presented an allusion to printing technology, with its Ben-Day dots, and to art history, with its "Art Nouveau forms". Though "crude and simplistic" the work demonstrates artistic intellect.Girl with Ball is described by Diane Waldman as "striking" in the simple and bold way it presents a vacation atmosphere. She notes it is "reminiscent of Picasso's frolicking bather in one of his paintings on the subject, Bather with Beach Ball (fig. 48), 1932," especially in the way Lichtenstein has scaled down the representation and the way he depicts movement.The newspaper ad source provided Lichtenstein with "one of the most common tropes of the day for the image of a woman." The updated Betty Grable-type subject, was a fashionable glamor figure that Lichtenstein used for a symbolic value that ranks her with "iconoclastic female figures, including Manet's Olympia, 1863, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 and de Kooning's three series of Women".
Olympia Betty Grable Picasso de Kooning Ben-Day dots Women Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Manet Art Nouveau