Him

It is unclear whether the title of Roy Lichtenstein's drawing is an exclamation of recognition, accusation, or lovesickness. Like a cell taken from a comic strip, the work seems to be part of a complex narrative, but the story is incomplete. A woman, recognizable only by her fingernails at the edge of the frame, holds a picture of a stereotypically handsome man-sharply dressed, with cleft chin, beaming smile, and jet-black hair. Her ambiguous relationship to the man lends poignancy and drama to the work. By reproducing the polka-dot shading of commercial printing on an exaggerated scale, Lichtenstein meant to call to mind periodicals like newspapers and comics, in which people are reduced to one-dimensional types. Ironically, Him was much more difficult to make than an equivalent print. It was meticulously built by hand, using a mixture of graphite and tusche, a viscous lithographic ink, stenciled on paper.