Golf Balls (sometimes Golfball) is a 1962 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is considered to fall within the art movement known as pop art. It depicts "a single sphere with patterned, variously directional semi-circular grooves." The work is commonly associated with black-and-white Piet Mondrian works. It is one of the works that was presented at Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition and one that was critical to his early association with pop art. The work is commonly critiqued for its tension involving a three-dimensional representation in two dimensions with much discussion revolving around the choice of a background nearly without any perspective.
The use of black and white is regarded as dramatic, and although it may have been influenced by 1940s and 1950s works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, it is more likely a commentary on Mondrian's 1917 Composition in Black and White. Alternatively, it may have been a reference to another of Mondrian's pre-World War I black and white oval paintings, such as Pier and Ocean, 1915. For someone familiar with modern art, the formally related oval paintings of Piet Mondrian from before the First World War (Ill. p. 26) may come to mind. This complementary source art was common of Lichtenstein's 1960s work on frequently advertised objects. "Lichtenstein's dramatic use of black and white is also a feature of subsequent paintings such as Golf Ball, 1962 ... Lichtenstein describes his sources as Mondrian Plus and Minus paintings.
Golf Ball is an example of the emerging "confident authority" of his single-image paintings with its "Rock of Gibraltar-like thereness". The "frontal and centralized presentations directness lacked the sophistication to market the images of household goods for advertising but was considered daring artistically.
The black and white painting on a grey background challenges both the natural perception of realism and the boundaries of abstraction. The work "gives us both the impression of space and the fact of surface".Golf Ball was one of the bases by which "critics aligned him with other practitioners of Pop Art", although much is made about the painting's references to abstract painting, especially its likeness to Mondrian's works. Furthermore, the painting leverages tensions regarding three-dimensional representation in two dimensions resulting from spatial ambiguities caused by the lack of cues in the background.
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