Talk:Golf Ball

There are extensive quotes from copyrighted works in the footnotes. The writer of this article could have taken the time to phase things in his own words, rather than extensive quoting:

from Waldman

• "Lichtenstein's dramatic use of black and white is also a feature of subsequent paitings such as Golf Ball, 1962, and may be related to the black-and-white paintings created by Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and others in the 1940s and 1950s. More to the point, perhaps, Lichtenstein chose this image to comment on the work of Mondrian (see fig. 32), which was of interest to him at the time. Here, Lichtenstein emulated Mondrian's reductive style and translated the Dutch artist's system of simple plus and minus forms into his own series of signs, breaking down the common object of a golf ball into a collection of hooked marks surrounded by a bold black outline."
• "Golf Ball, 1962 is composed of a series of black and white arcs that form an abstract pattern reminiscent of Mondrian’s plus and minus system. At the same time, by means of their placement, these black and white lines conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object. But the placement of the golf ball on a neutral ground once again neutralizes the object as a volumetric form. This manipulation of the two and three dimensional is one that the artist obviously relishes for he returns to it repeatedly."
• "Lichtenstein's experience as a draftsman is reflected in his spare presentation of kitchen stoves, washing machines, bathroom interiors, golf balls, ice cream sodas, cherry pies, hot dogs, sneakers, socks, etc. and in his highly enlarged depictions of such domestic rituals as wiping, spraying, and sponging (see, for example, Golf Ball, Bathroom, Washing Machine, The Refrigerator, Spray, and Sponge II..."
• "Both Black Flowers and Golf Ball are successful examples of this dialectic. In Black Flowers, the artist unified his imagery by means of the Benday-dot screen, whereas in Golf Ball bare areas of canvas unite figure and field. This ambiguity between two-dimensional and three-dimensional is one that he obviously relishes, for he has returned to it repeatedly."
• "Single-object paintings such as Golf Ball (fig. 31), 1962, suggest spatial illusion largely by virtue of their subject. We know that a galf ball is three-dimensional, and so most of us project the additional dimension onto such a two-dimensional image even though it may not be depicted in that manner. We bring to the image our knowledge of the object as an entity that occupies a particular, concrete space."

• Waldman is also quoted extensively in other, related articles, e.g. Yellow and Green Brushstrokes, Girl with Ball, Whaam!, Bedroom at Arles, Girl in Mirror, Artist's Studio—Look Mickey, Little Big Painting, Drowning Girl and others.

from Lobel

• "...it was through paintings like...Golf Ball...that critics aligned him with other practitioners of Pop Art...Many of his paintings of objects veer toward abstraction, whether Golf Ball's radiating fields of arcs enclosed within a circular form...In this way these works often make reference to the traditions of abstract painting. For instance, critics have long noted that the arcing lines of Golf Ball bear more than a passing resemblance to the distinctive forms used in Piet Mondrian's plus-and-minus paintings. Taking on some of the central concerns of modern abstraction, Lichtenstein often sets up in these paintings visual tension between figure and ground. For example, Golf Ball offers a veritable oscillation between the figural resolution of the object and its dissolution into the blank ground, in part because the white of the ball is the same as that of the background. In other words, although we tend to perceive the depicted image as an object – in this case, a golf ball – at the same time we are aware of it as an utterly flat field of abstracted marks."

from Alloway

• "Some of Lichtenstein's paintings of 1962 maintain the hesitant, exploratory character of 1961, but others display a confident authority. This is particularly evident in the single-image paintings, which take on a Rock of Gibraltar-like thereness, and in the paintings from war comics, which have a clarity and elaboration in advance of the comparatively constrained romance subjects. It is in these works that Lichtenstein demonstrated his sense of pictorial completeness, a constituent of his mature art, for the first time. One step was to standardize the contour, so that the lines around objects became more uniform, solidifying the inflections that remained in 1961 from his painterly days."

from Foster

• "Thus Lichtenstein seemed to challenge the oppositions on which pure painting was founded: high versus low, fine versus commercial, even abstract versus figurative. Consider Golf Ball (1962), a circle outlined and dimpled in black on white – to signify shadow and light – on a light grey ground. A golf ball is a prime object of suburban banality, but here it also recalls the pristine plus-and-minus abstractions Mondrian painted forty-five years before. On one hand, the near abstraction of Golf Ball tests our sense of realism, which Lichtenstein shows to be a conventional code, a matter of signs that sometimes possess only scant resemblance to actual things in the other world. On the other hand, when a Mondrian begins to look like a golf ball, then the category of abstraction is surely in trouble too."
• "gives us both the impression of space and the fact of surface"

from Mercurio

• "Good examples of just how abstraction and figuration were superimposed to propose fresh solutions are Lichtenstein's Golf Ball (1962) and Ball of Twine (1963). The golf ball, even though reduced to a pure graphic mark on a gray ground, the result of a treatment that eliminates chiaroscuro, and still recognizable, is also a totality of abstract marks. (Its formal assonance with a grid has been pointed out at various times, particularly with the "more or less" Mondrrian oval works, these too painted in black and white.)"
• "Golf Ball and Ball of Twine highlight how the more an image is synthesized by eliminating its three-dimensionality, chiaroscuro and a landscape context, the more it takes on the characteristics of abstraction.)"

from Livingston

• "The frontal and centralized presentation employed by Lichtenstein in early pairings of domestic objects, such as Roto Broil and Electric Cord of 1961 and Golf Ball (1962), was of such assertive directness that it would have been dismissed in contemporary advertising as too crude and unsophisticated. In the context of painting, however, this projection of an image so as to be instantly apprehended as a whole – as a perceptual pattern or structure that in psychological terms would be labelled a Gestalt – was daring in its austere simplicity, anticipating the Minimalism of the mid 1960s. Together with an emphasis on the surface as a flat pattern of dots, brightly coloured shapes and black outlines, this fixing of the image to the centre stressed the painting as a static object."

Steven Henry, Madoff, ed

• "Golf Ball, 1962, is composed of a series of black and white arcs that form an abstract pattern reminiscent of Mondrian's plus and minus system. At the same time, by means of their placement, the black and white lines conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object. But the placement of the golf ball on a neutral ground once again neutralizes the object as a volumetric form. This manipulation of the two and three dimensional is one that the artist obviously relishes for he returns to it repeatedly."
• "Focus: The Major Artists". Pop Art: A Critical History. University of California Press. p. 198. ISBN 0-520-21018-2. "Yes. The first show was very diverse. I did the Roto-Broil; the Engagement Ring; a round picture The Cat, which I got from a cat food package; the Golf Ball, which was a single object i black and white; In, which was just letters; and Soda, which is blue and white."

from Hendrickson

• The small cusps and ellipses indicating the pores of its surface make it recognizable as a three-dimensional object, but they are also a play on abstract signs. 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. Yet there are also parallels with contemporary art. The simultaneous reduction of subject and inflation of scale in Golfball shares the humorous effect of Claes Oldenburg's sculputre.
• "...the repetitive regularity of their patterned surfaces..." (in article body)

etc.

MathewTownsend (talk) 15:17, 21 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

I believe these are quotations that make it easy for the reader to quickly verify that the source backs up what the article claims (Wikipedia:Citing sources#Additional annotation). They should not be paraphrased, because the whole point is to reflect what the original sources say exactly. I do agree it's excessive. They could be shortened by removing replacing irrelevant bits with ellipses. @MathewTownsend, TonyTheTiger, and Status: what say you? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 12:37, 22 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Finnusertop, Have at it.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 02:11, 27 September 2016 (UTC)Reply