Drowning Girl

A weeping young woman sinks beneath a cresting wave, a thought bubble declaring that she would rather drown than call 'Brad' for help - a single melodramatic comic panel enlarged to the scale of a serious painting. Roy Lichtenstein rendered Drowning Girl with the bold outlines, flat color, and Ben-Day dots of cheap printing, framing soap-opera emotion with cool irony. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, it is among his most celebrated works - mass-media kitsch and feminine melodrama transformed, with deadpan precision, into an icon of Pop art's love-hate embrace of popular culture.