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Neil Gaiman asks the Museum of Modern Art why it doesn’t credit the original artist behind Roy Lichtenstein’s famous painting, Drowning Girl.
Author Neil Gaiman called out the Museum of Modern Art for not properly crediting a DC Comics artist in its description for a painting by Roy Lichtenstein.
The MoMA’s description notes the specific comic that inspired Lichtenstein’s painting, Drowning Girl, but does not credit the original artist, Tony Abruzzo, which was noted by Gaiman in a tweet directed at the museum. “You mention the DC comic, SECRET LOVE #83, that Lichtenstein traced his Drowning Girl from,” Gaiman said. “Wouldn’t it be better if you credited the human artist who drew it? His name was Tony Abruzzo.”
Crediting the publisher and not the artist contributes to the fiction that these comics were created by companies and not by people, and that nobody drew the original images.
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 13, 2021
Gaiman added in a follow-up tweet, “Crediting the publisher and not the artist contributes to the fiction that these comics were created by companies and not by people, and that nobody drew the original images.” The MoMA has not responded or updated the description of Drowning Girl.
In the description for the 1963 oil painting Drowning Girl, the MoMA stated that the source for the painting was “Run for Love!,” a story in Secret Love #83 from DC Comics which was published in 1962. Abruzzo mainly worked on romance comic books for National Periodicals/DC Comics in the 1950s and ’60s. The original page featured the eponymous Drowning Girl in the middle of the ocean, with her boyfriend in the background hanging on to a capsized boat.
Lichtenstein was an American pop artist and one of the leading figures in the 1960s new art movement, along with artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In his take on Abruzzo’s original illustration, Lichtenstein removed the background characters, tracing Abruzzo’s original drowning girl before altering the composition to his liking. He then traced the sketch onto a canvas, which then became one of his most famous paintings. At the time, Lichtenstein said of the painting, “I was very excited about, and interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached, impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc. in these cartoon images.”
This is not the first instance of a museum crediting the comic book publisher and not the original artist. A similar incident occurred with another Lichtenstein painting, Whaam!, which borrowed from artist Irv Novick’s panel in the 1962 DC Comic All American Men of War. Whaam! was displayed in the British modern art museum, Tate Modern, with Novick’s name missing from the painting’s description.
Source: Twitter, The Museum of Modern Art
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