Woman in Bath
Lichtenstein, Roy

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Woman in Bath was painted in 1963, most likely inspired by a sequence from a romantic serial. The subject of a bathing woman, a fairly frequent theme in art history in the form of The Toilet of Venus, was commonly depicted by Pop artists. The female figure, her contours delimited by thick lines set against a white background, is painted in an elementary palette of primary colours — blue, yellow and red — applied using the characteristic Benday dots. Gail Levin links this work to another oil painting produced the same year, Drowning Girl. In both compositions Lichtenstein shows the face and hands of a woman in water, but whereas the figure in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza painting is placidly enjoying a bath and gazes at the viewer with a broad smile, the girl in the other painting, who wears a contorted expression, is drowning in a sea of her own tears. The smiling figure of the former stands out against the static geometry of the background tiled wall, while the image in the painting in The Museum of Modern Art is caught up in a whirlpool of turbulent water which, according to Lichtenstein’s own testimony, is copied from the Japanese artist Hokusai’s engraving of The Great Wave.

The disturbing women in Lichtenstein’s paintings of the mid 1960s are embodiments of modern heroines. He shows them in different poses: sometimes as busy housewives, in a role they accept smilingly in a male-dominated world; on other occasions as characters in dramas of passions, in which they express anxiety, nervousness and fear. By portraying this stereotyped image of women of his day in his art, Lichtenstein merely intended to make a plastic statement about their need to aim for a new ideal: “Women draw themselves this way — that is what makeup really is. They put their lips on in a certain shape and do their hair to resemble a certain ideal.”


Source: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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Image total size 25.0 x 24.9 cm
Print total size 29.0 x 28.9 cm

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The reproduction is rolled in a rigid tube for shipping.
Fine Art Giclée printing is commonly used at a professional level for the reproduction of works of art. The inkjet printing technique uses natural pigments which are highly light-resistant. We use a special 260g/m2 matte Fine Art paper for high-quality reproductions.
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