Tom Wesselmann

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Colours: The colours are fairly accurate, although the lips tend more towards a cherry red and the pubic hair tends more towards a light brown in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is light wear and handling marks towards the edges. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Realised toward the end of the artist’s life, Sunset Nudes (Big Sun) belongs to perhaps his most important group of paintings since the iconic Great American Nudes of the 1960s. Tom Wesselmann’s series Sunset Nudes (2002-2004) recalls the highly provocative, sexed-up blondes of the earlier series in a refined and flawless light. Swaths of bold colours are tightly contained within contiguous lines to create a smooth and seductive composition. Monumental in size, Sunset Nudesis unashamedly retrospective, rooted in the magazine and billboard imagery of the sixties out of which Wesselmann’s practice emerged.

According to critic Lucy Lippard, Wesselmann was one of the five most “hard-core” artists of the Pop era alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and Rosenquist (Lucy Lippard, Pop Art, New York 1966). In his formative years, Wesselmann trained as a cartoonist and was highly susceptible to the stylization of contemporary visual culture and mass media. Channelling these influences he pushed the boundaries of conventional High Art depictions of the female nude.

In the present work, a languid reclining female is depicted underneath a sanguine sunset, her figure pressed, somewhat surreally, upon the canvas like a paper cut-out. Her form refuses to recede into the background and is but one constituent element of the tropical paradise. Glossy lips, voluptuous curves and the absence of the subject’s gaze heighten the provocative nature of the work and simultaneously destabilize the viewer.

What is most striking about Sunset Nude (Big Sun) is the ease with which an art historical sensitivity is integrated with the Pop aesthetic. “I felt a strong obligation, in a sense, to be the next in line, or to take up the next position in the whole progression… [from] Matisse [to the] present” (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Long Beach, University Art Museum, Tom Wesselmann: The Intimate Images, 2003, p.4). Wesselmann was greatly influenced by Matisse and continued the legacy of both the reclining female and the drawn line in a unique visual language that is strong and immediately identifiable. It seems only fitting that Sunset Nude (Big Sun) evokes the pleasurable atmosphere in Matisse’s early work, La joie de vivre (1905-6).