Lichtenstein Girl with Ball

In Girl with Ball, executed in 1968, Lichtenstein’s iconic 1961 image is subjected to Pettibone’s signature style of appropriation. Although Pettibone often made multiple version of a subject, we know of only this version of Girl with Ball; however, the image was included in one of his multi-image ‘combine’ paintings Seductive Girl, Girl with Ball, 4 Jackies, Woman with Flowered Hat, Madame Cezanne, The Kiss, and Four Marilyns, 1970 (Princeton University Art Museum). This miniature work’s tongue-in-cheek homage to one of Lichtenstein’s most famous images is emblematic of Pettibone’s parodic approach to art-making. Lichtenstein’s painting of this subject is now in the Museum of Modern Art as a gift of Phillip Johnson.

Pop masterworks were a ripe subject for Pettibone, as they were typically hand-painted and already derived from popular culture. For his painting, Lichtenstein used advertising imagery in The New York Times for a resort in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania as source material. He then transformed the original photographic image into a painting using comic-book techniques, such as Ben-Day dots and simplified contours. When the painting was exhibited at Lichtenstein’s 1962 exhibition at Castelli Gallery, it was reproduced in a number of magazines, including Newsweek. Pettibone typically based the scale of his paintings off the sizes of reproductions in printed media; in this way, the miniature dimensions of his replica highlight the three levels of appropriation of the original image.

Executed only seven years after Lichtenstein’s work, this painting illuminates that the two artists were contemporaries. Indeed, Pettibone began his replicas two decades before appropriation became a prevalent artistic strategy in the 1980s. Although Girl with Ball is exquisitely accurate, it is not a simple imitation, but instead a dialogue with the past. By changing its scale, Pettibone’s manipulation of Lichtenstein’s artwork also altered its intimacy and impact. It is this blurring between original and copy, representation and represented, that has solidified Pettibone’s standing as a pioneer of appropriation art.