Tom Wesselmann

Paris, Aspetti dell'Arte Contemporanea / Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, 1963
Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, OK America, 1969, no. 28
Berkeley, University Art Museum, University of California, Made in U.S.A., An Americanization in Modern Art, the '50's & '60's, 1987

Tom Wesselmann's place in the canon of American Pop Art was established without question by his famous series of Still Lifes from 1962 to 1964 and Great American Nudes from 1959 to the late 1960s.  Like many of his fellow Pop artists, Wesselmann was often uncomfortable with the label and the rigid parameters set for Pop Art by some art critics and the public.  He noted that "They begin to sound like some nostalgia cult - they really worship Marilyn Monroe and Coca Cola.  The importance people attach to things an artist uses is irrelevant...I use a billboard picture because it is real, special representations of something, not because it is from a billboard.  Advertising images excite me mainly because of what I can make from them" (Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, London, 1966, p. 80).

With the early classic works such as the present lot Still Life # 5 1/2 from 1962, Wesselmann used the commercial advertising images in a direct way, juxtaposing his own painted passages with the collaged elements composed within a shallow space. As the complexity of his constructions grew, Wesselmann acknowledged that his "colours became flatter, cleaner brighter; edges became harder, clearer...This way, by becoming static and somewhat anonymous, they also became more charged with energy" (John Rublowsky, Pop Art, New York, 1965, p. 137).  Having started his career as a reluctant expressionist in the shadow of the great Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, Wesselmann's breakthrough came when he began to incorporate elements from advertising and popular culture into his work. In essence this volte-face from the rigidly intellectual practice of abstraction towards Pop art and its shamelessly brash, colourful and fearless glorification of kitsch represents the watermark in post-war American Art as the baton was passed from the first generation of Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell to the young pretenders.

Sidney Janis' show of Wesselmann's work in 1962 alongside such artists as Warhol, Indiana and Lichtenstein had a seismic influence on the New York art scene revelling in the influence of post war European art that was increasingly being shown on their side of the Atlantic. The rise in American prosperity and thus the complimentary growth in the power of the brand within popular culture made Wesselmann's choice to explore its limitations and possibilities within the art work's pictorial space wholly appropriate for its time. By requisitioning whole brands from magazines and billboards, the ubiquitous and mass produced image of the Marlboro packet assumed greater cultural significance and refocused the public's interface with the burgeoning number of commercial icons around them. The logo, a semiotic absolute in its strictest sense, became suddenly complicated and opened up to re-interpretation. In the same way, the incorporation of corporate collage onto a painted surface complicated the received wisdom of traditional artistic practice in a more populist way than had been achieved by Picasso's cubist examinations earlier in the century. The seemingly ingenuous and straightforward appearance of works such as Still Life # 5½ belies the fascinating contradictions that the artist used in his work. The use of advertising images to parody the aspirations for which they supply the very building blocks is an extremely powerful investigation into the vacuous falsehood of the American Dream and the idyllic domestic household so prevalent in the media of the day. As a stunning example of Tom Wesselmann's first series of works to examine the way in which society views its own culture, the present lot can be seen as both a seminal piece from the artist's strongest period and wonderful moment from the Pop Art movement that represents a high point in Post-War American Art.