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Lot Essay
Alongside Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup cans and Hollywood superstars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-inspired canvases are central not only to the pantheon of Pop Art, but also to the wider history of twentieth-century art. Among these works, Anxious Girl stands at the pinnacle of a select group of works for which Roy Lichtenstein is most celebrated: his iconic paintings of forlorn lovers inspired by mass-produced comic books. By taking images from popular culture as his starting point, Lichtenstein interrogates the very nature of how we look at and perceive images. Painted in 1964, at the height of the artist’s career, the present work showcases how Lichtenstein distills complex visual cues into three basic elements—line, color, and form—and then uses them to convey the emotions of the human experience. Previously owned by the legendary collectors Horace and Holly Solomon, the present work has been in the current owner’s private collection for over thirty years. Rarely seen in public, Anxious Girl is a masterpiece of Pop Art and represents an important piece of art history.
Staring out from the surface of the canvas with her piercing blue eyes, a young woman engages the viewer directly. Black bold lines define her silhouette, while more refined lines portray her youthful features. The long blonde hair that frames her face is manifested out of a variety of hand painted gestures: substantial marks create a sense of volume, more developed ones create form. The woman’s flawless skin is constituted by a field of Lichtenstein’s iconic Ben-Day dots, the heart of the artist’s practice. Mimicking the commercial printing process of the original comic books, in Anxious Girl the dots are not printed or screened, but meticulously applied directly by the artist’s hand.
Wearing a pretty Courrèges-inspired dress with its iconic bold colors and striking geometric patterns, the subject of Lichtenstein's painting is the archetypal "perfect" blonde of the 1960s, but here, as in other works from this groundbreaking group in Lichtenstein's retelling, something is different. A single painted line, positioned in the middle of her forehead, transforms her appearance with a slight furrowed brow—and with this simple addition, her entire demeanor transforms. What could cause such anxiety? Tantalizingly, the cause of her emotions is not revealed, but given the usual narrative of the source material, it normally involved unrequited love.
Lichtenstein found his source image for Anxious Girl in a story called “Too Much to Ask,” published in Girls’ Romances #97 in December 1963. In it, our heroine—Jan—is torn between her love for two men: Stewart, a new associate at her father’s firm, and Bill, a familiar friend. She is deeply attracted to the older Stewart, who knows he is not a suitable match but nonetheless leads her on; Bill, on the other hand, reignites a love that Jan had been hiding for a while. Eventually, Bill wins the day and proposes to Jan, with Stewart’s blessing. Lichtenstein appropriates the image in the opening panel, which depicts Jan caught between her two suitors. In his painting, however, Lichtenstein removes all extraneous details by tightly cropping in on the young woman’s face, adding to the sense of drama. He then makes a series of subtle but significant changes, including switching the colors and pattern on her dress to a more impactful composition. He also amplifies the appearance of her hair by using fewer, but thicker, contours to add volume. More importantly, though, the artist introduces a single line, the furrow line not found in the original image, which lends the work its title, “Anxious Girl.”
I don’t draw a picture to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it.Roy Lichtenstein
This dramatic shift demonstrates Lichtenstein’s highly sophisticated understanding of how we look. From his days as an art student at Ohio State University, he was interested in going beyond mere representation, dedicating himself to understanding how the brain understands and processes visual imagery. Much of his thinking was developed under the tutelage of Hoyt L. Sherman, whom he studied under at Ohio State University in the 1940s. Sherman believed that “students must develop an ability to see familiar objects in terms of visual qualities, and they must develop this ability to the degree that old associations with such objects will have only a secondary or a submerged role during the seeing-and-drawing act” (quoted by B. Rose, The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 29). This theory was reinforced by Sherman’s use of what he called his ‘flash room’—a darkened room where images of objects were briefly flashed onto a screen for the students to copy. Teaching painting and drawing in this particular fashion proved to be extremely influential for Lichtenstein as it forced him to focus his attention on the most important visual aspects of the object's structure, and not to become distracted by extraneous matters such as unnecessary decoration.
The richness of Anxious Girl is the result of a vibrant field of red Ben-Day dots which Lichtenstein uses to build up his fertile surface. The artist’s work was described by the critic Hal Foster as the ‘handmade readymade’ (quoted in “Pop Eye,” London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 16, August 22, 2002, online [accessed: 3/20/2026]): not industrially mechanized, but blending careful techniques of handwork (drawing, tracing, painting, emphasizing brushstroke, line, and Ben-Day dot mimicking commercial printing) with the aesthetics of reproduction. “It is not art trouvé but art retrouvé: refashioned, recovered, reframed. And in the process, the simplistic distinctions between making and manufacturing begin to dissolve” (S. Churchwell, “Roy Lichtenstein: From heresy to visionary,” The Guardian, February 23, 2013, online [accessed: 3/25/2026]). Although aping what he saw in the real world, Lichtenstein was clear that his lines and dots were not trying to recreate reality, and much like the tenets of the critic Clement Greenberg and his Abstract Expressionism forebears, they should just be celebrated for their visual properties alone. “My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart, ed., Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 52).
Color is an often-overlooked aspect of Lichtenstein’s work, yet the present work is an exceptional example of the artist’s use of vibrant pigment to heighten the palpable sense of drama conveyed by the image. Using just the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), Lichtenstein places them in close proximity to create a visual tension. Ordinarily these pigments are opposites on the color wheel, separated by their intermediary secondary colors, but in the present work their close proximity produces a resonance which activates the image, bringing it alive with visual energy.
Thus, with Anxious Girl, Lichtenstein makes an important intervention in the history of portraiture. One of the oldest forms of painting, from the earliest days of human existence people have been reproducing their own likeness to permanently record their place in the world. Beginning with prehistoric hunting scenes drawn on the wall of caves, the portrait has evolved to become a representation of both the personal and the powerful. Used by kings and queens to establish and promote their power, and by parents to arrange suitable marriages, portraits have acted as memorials and tokens of love. After forty thousand years of portrait painting, Lichtenstein separated the subject of the painting from the emotion it induced, distilling centuries of painterly tradition to its most essential elements. As the artist himself has said, “I don’t draw a picture to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it” (quoted in M. Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop, New Haven, 2002, p. 26). Lichtenstein’s radical analytical approach was a marked departure from those of his Pop Art contemporaries Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg and established his reputation as both a critically and institutionally important artist.
Anxious Girl comes with the exceptional provenance of having been acquired first by Horace and Holly Solomon, important collectors who became important early patrons of Pop Art. The Solomons were major figures in the New York art world of the 1960s and by the later years of that decade their apartment was filled with canonical works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claus Oldenburg. In 1966 Holly Solomon commissioned Andy Warhol to produce his now famous nine-paneled portrait of her. Warhol decided to produce this portrait using the technique of silk-screening photo booth portraits that he had developed a few years earlier. The pair went off to Broadway and 42nd Street in New York with $25 in quarters to test each of the photo booths to find the one with the correct exposure that Warhol required for the look he was trying to achieve. Once Warhol had selected the booth, he left Solomon to take the photographs on her own. When the sessions were finished, she handed the strips of photographs to Warhol and told him to select whichever he thought best. The resulting portrait immortalized Solomon’s reputation as the ‘Princess of Pop,’ a persona further enhanced by other artists who immortalized Solomon including Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Artschwager, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein.
The Solomons enjoyed a long friendship with Lichtenstein that lasted many years, resulting in the couple making a number of acquisitions and commissions of the artist’s work. Initially, Horace had read an article about Lichtenstein and, having tracked him down through his gallery, acquired the first work by the artist that the couple owned. “For Horace,” Holly Solomon later recalled, “the work expressed both his childhood and his memories of a popular childhood idiom of American culture—the comic strip” (quoted in H. Solomon and A. Anderson, Living with Art, New York, 1988, p. 202). In 1966, Solomon asked Lichtenstein if he too would paint a portrait of her, just as Warhol had done. In an oral interview with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation archive, she recalled the process. “I asked Roy if he’d do the portrait…Roy said we should show him our favorite cartoons…I picked out a few comic books…I just said to Roy, ‘Whatever you like, Roy, you just do the damned portrait.’ All I cared about was that the lips should say, ‘I, sorry.’” The resulting portrait, I… I’m Sorry!, hung for many years in the Solomon’s family room and is now in the permanent collection of The Broad in Los Angeles. Other later Solomon acquisitions of Lichtenstein’s work included the Surrealist inspired Swimming Figure with Mirror (1977) and the sculpture Double Glass (1979).
I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques.
Roy Lichtenstein
What is remarkable about Lichtenstein’s paintings is that his reductive style obscured his intentions in a way that made the paintings both accessible to the general public and intriguing to critics. But it was this tension between style and subject matter that was the foundation of his practice. He chose comics as they were culturally ‘low art’ and transformed them into ‘high art’. “At that time,” Lichtenstein recalled, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques” (quoted in J. Coplands, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 89). Lichtenstein certainly found in this material a potential for the dispassionate portrayal of exaggerated emotion. The paradox of his work has always remained that its outward embrace of quotidian imagery belies an inward concern for art as arrangements of colors and shapes. It is as if he has taken Mondrian’s emphasis on the inherent flatness of the picture plane and combined it with the concept of the Duchamp readymade. But instead of producing something dry and cerebral he has created a painting that is sensual, ironically witty, and full of energy.
Throughout his career, Roy Lichtenstein produced a complex and varied body of work. His paintings engage the viewer in questions of visual perception, by subverting the illusion of representation. His paintings resulted from his preoccupation with the formal qualities of art and the complex task of representing the ephemeral quality of artistic illusionism. Anxious Girl is the result of his dilemma of how to produce a three-dimensional object whilst still retaining the aesthetic qualities of his two-dimensional work. His unique solution was to combine the solidity and clean lines and Ben-Day dots with the pure, rich color pigment a burst of three-dimensional surreal illusionism. In doing so he not only examines the ways in which a contemporary audience applies meaning and value to the most basic visual signs, but by using post-impressionist masterpieces as his starting point, highlights how this has changed over the decades.
Staring out from the surface of the canvas with her piercing blue eyes, a young woman engages the viewer directly. Black bold lines define her silhouette, while more refined lines portray her youthful features. The long blonde hair that frames her face is manifested out of a variety of hand painted gestures: substantial marks create a sense of volume, more developed ones create form. The woman’s flawless skin is constituted by a field of Lichtenstein’s iconic Ben-Day dots, the heart of the artist’s practice. Mimicking the commercial printing process of the original comic books, in Anxious Girl the dots are not printed or screened, but meticulously applied directly by the artist’s hand.
Wearing a pretty Courrèges-inspired dress with its iconic bold colors and striking geometric patterns, the subject of Lichtenstein's painting is the archetypal "perfect" blonde of the 1960s, but here, as in other works from this groundbreaking group in Lichtenstein's retelling, something is different. A single painted line, positioned in the middle of her forehead, transforms her appearance with a slight furrowed brow—and with this simple addition, her entire demeanor transforms. What could cause such anxiety? Tantalizingly, the cause of her emotions is not revealed, but given the usual narrative of the source material, it normally involved unrequited love.
Lichtenstein found his source image for Anxious Girl in a story called “Too Much to Ask,” published in Girls’ Romances #97 in December 1963. In it, our heroine—Jan—is torn between her love for two men: Stewart, a new associate at her father’s firm, and Bill, a familiar friend. She is deeply attracted to the older Stewart, who knows he is not a suitable match but nonetheless leads her on; Bill, on the other hand, reignites a love that Jan had been hiding for a while. Eventually, Bill wins the day and proposes to Jan, with Stewart’s blessing. Lichtenstein appropriates the image in the opening panel, which depicts Jan caught between her two suitors. In his painting, however, Lichtenstein removes all extraneous details by tightly cropping in on the young woman’s face, adding to the sense of drama. He then makes a series of subtle but significant changes, including switching the colors and pattern on her dress to a more impactful composition. He also amplifies the appearance of her hair by using fewer, but thicker, contours to add volume. More importantly, though, the artist introduces a single line, the furrow line not found in the original image, which lends the work its title, “Anxious Girl.”
I don’t draw a picture to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it.Roy Lichtenstein
This dramatic shift demonstrates Lichtenstein’s highly sophisticated understanding of how we look. From his days as an art student at Ohio State University, he was interested in going beyond mere representation, dedicating himself to understanding how the brain understands and processes visual imagery. Much of his thinking was developed under the tutelage of Hoyt L. Sherman, whom he studied under at Ohio State University in the 1940s. Sherman believed that “students must develop an ability to see familiar objects in terms of visual qualities, and they must develop this ability to the degree that old associations with such objects will have only a secondary or a submerged role during the seeing-and-drawing act” (quoted by B. Rose, The Drawings of Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 29). This theory was reinforced by Sherman’s use of what he called his ‘flash room’—a darkened room where images of objects were briefly flashed onto a screen for the students to copy. Teaching painting and drawing in this particular fashion proved to be extremely influential for Lichtenstein as it forced him to focus his attention on the most important visual aspects of the object's structure, and not to become distracted by extraneous matters such as unnecessary decoration.
The richness of Anxious Girl is the result of a vibrant field of red Ben-Day dots which Lichtenstein uses to build up his fertile surface. The artist’s work was described by the critic Hal Foster as the ‘handmade readymade’ (quoted in “Pop Eye,” London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 16, August 22, 2002, online [accessed: 3/20/2026]): not industrially mechanized, but blending careful techniques of handwork (drawing, tracing, painting, emphasizing brushstroke, line, and Ben-Day dot mimicking commercial printing) with the aesthetics of reproduction. “It is not art trouvé but art retrouvé: refashioned, recovered, reframed. And in the process, the simplistic distinctions between making and manufacturing begin to dissolve” (S. Churchwell, “Roy Lichtenstein: From heresy to visionary,” The Guardian, February 23, 2013, online [accessed: 3/25/2026]). Although aping what he saw in the real world, Lichtenstein was clear that his lines and dots were not trying to recreate reality, and much like the tenets of the critic Clement Greenberg and his Abstract Expressionism forebears, they should just be celebrated for their visual properties alone. “My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart, ed., Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 52).
Color is an often-overlooked aspect of Lichtenstein’s work, yet the present work is an exceptional example of the artist’s use of vibrant pigment to heighten the palpable sense of drama conveyed by the image. Using just the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), Lichtenstein places them in close proximity to create a visual tension. Ordinarily these pigments are opposites on the color wheel, separated by their intermediary secondary colors, but in the present work their close proximity produces a resonance which activates the image, bringing it alive with visual energy.
Thus, with Anxious Girl, Lichtenstein makes an important intervention in the history of portraiture. One of the oldest forms of painting, from the earliest days of human existence people have been reproducing their own likeness to permanently record their place in the world. Beginning with prehistoric hunting scenes drawn on the wall of caves, the portrait has evolved to become a representation of both the personal and the powerful. Used by kings and queens to establish and promote their power, and by parents to arrange suitable marriages, portraits have acted as memorials and tokens of love. After forty thousand years of portrait painting, Lichtenstein separated the subject of the painting from the emotion it induced, distilling centuries of painterly tradition to its most essential elements. As the artist himself has said, “I don’t draw a picture to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it” (quoted in M. Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop, New Haven, 2002, p. 26). Lichtenstein’s radical analytical approach was a marked departure from those of his Pop Art contemporaries Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg and established his reputation as both a critically and institutionally important artist.
Anxious Girl comes with the exceptional provenance of having been acquired first by Horace and Holly Solomon, important collectors who became important early patrons of Pop Art. The Solomons were major figures in the New York art world of the 1960s and by the later years of that decade their apartment was filled with canonical works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claus Oldenburg. In 1966 Holly Solomon commissioned Andy Warhol to produce his now famous nine-paneled portrait of her. Warhol decided to produce this portrait using the technique of silk-screening photo booth portraits that he had developed a few years earlier. The pair went off to Broadway and 42nd Street in New York with $25 in quarters to test each of the photo booths to find the one with the correct exposure that Warhol required for the look he was trying to achieve. Once Warhol had selected the booth, he left Solomon to take the photographs on her own. When the sessions were finished, she handed the strips of photographs to Warhol and told him to select whichever he thought best. The resulting portrait immortalized Solomon’s reputation as the ‘Princess of Pop,’ a persona further enhanced by other artists who immortalized Solomon including Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Artschwager, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein.
The Solomons enjoyed a long friendship with Lichtenstein that lasted many years, resulting in the couple making a number of acquisitions and commissions of the artist’s work. Initially, Horace had read an article about Lichtenstein and, having tracked him down through his gallery, acquired the first work by the artist that the couple owned. “For Horace,” Holly Solomon later recalled, “the work expressed both his childhood and his memories of a popular childhood idiom of American culture—the comic strip” (quoted in H. Solomon and A. Anderson, Living with Art, New York, 1988, p. 202). In 1966, Solomon asked Lichtenstein if he too would paint a portrait of her, just as Warhol had done. In an oral interview with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation archive, she recalled the process. “I asked Roy if he’d do the portrait…Roy said we should show him our favorite cartoons…I picked out a few comic books…I just said to Roy, ‘Whatever you like, Roy, you just do the damned portrait.’ All I cared about was that the lips should say, ‘I, sorry.’” The resulting portrait, I… I’m Sorry!, hung for many years in the Solomon’s family room and is now in the permanent collection of The Broad in Los Angeles. Other later Solomon acquisitions of Lichtenstein’s work included the Surrealist inspired Swimming Figure with Mirror (1977) and the sculpture Double Glass (1979).
I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques.
Roy Lichtenstein
What is remarkable about Lichtenstein’s paintings is that his reductive style obscured his intentions in a way that made the paintings both accessible to the general public and intriguing to critics. But it was this tension between style and subject matter that was the foundation of his practice. He chose comics as they were culturally ‘low art’ and transformed them into ‘high art’. “At that time,” Lichtenstein recalled, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques” (quoted in J. Coplands, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 89). Lichtenstein certainly found in this material a potential for the dispassionate portrayal of exaggerated emotion. The paradox of his work has always remained that its outward embrace of quotidian imagery belies an inward concern for art as arrangements of colors and shapes. It is as if he has taken Mondrian’s emphasis on the inherent flatness of the picture plane and combined it with the concept of the Duchamp readymade. But instead of producing something dry and cerebral he has created a painting that is sensual, ironically witty, and full of energy.
Throughout his career, Roy Lichtenstein produced a complex and varied body of work. His paintings engage the viewer in questions of visual perception, by subverting the illusion of representation. His paintings resulted from his preoccupation with the formal qualities of art and the complex task of representing the ephemeral quality of artistic illusionism. Anxious Girl is the result of his dilemma of how to produce a three-dimensional object whilst still retaining the aesthetic qualities of his two-dimensional work. His unique solution was to combine the solidity and clean lines and Ben-Day dots with the pure, rich color pigment a burst of three-dimensional surreal illusionism. In doing so he not only examines the ways in which a contemporary audience applies meaning and value to the most basic visual signs, but by using post-impressionist masterpieces as his starting point, highlights how this has changed over the decades.
