Tom Wesselmann

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Belgium
Private Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above in 2000)
Sotheby’s, New York, November 11, 2008, Lot 6
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, New Paintings By Wesselmann, May - June 1966, cat. no. 24, n.p., illustrated and frontispiece, illustrated (in the artist's studio, April 1966)

This painting is in good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
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Tom Wesselmann’s Mouth # 3 from 1966 is an early and outstanding example of the artist’s series of shaped canvases that were thematic developments from his iconic contribution to that decade’s explosion of American Pop Art: the Great American Nude series. Both the Mouth series, and its related Smoker series that followed shortly, focused on the enlarged and disembodied mouth of a female, caught in the act of conveying emotion or enjoying a cigarette. The mouth is an inherently seductive characteristic of a female’s appearance – a convenient and unmistakable allusion to sex and eroticism. Mouth #3 is particularly suggestive with its open Revlon-red lips luxuriantly smiling, and tilted at an angle suggestive of a reclining figure. Wesselmann exaggerated and magnified this most sensuous detail of the female body, not unlike his contemporary, Andy Warhol, another Pop Art icon, who also chose the female mouth as a fetishistic object when he portrayed Marilyn Monroe’s silhouetted lips for his great Marilyn’s Lipsfrom 1962.

In the watershed series of Great American Nudes, Wesselmann posed his female subjects seductively within interiors filled with products and symbols of American popular culture. As with the sister series, the Still Lifes and Interiors, Wesselmann later acknowledged a use of genre paintings to free himself from the pervasive influence of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s and find his own creative voice. As he related to the writer and critic Marco Livingstone, “..in choosing representational painting, I decided to do, as my subject matter the history of art: I would do nudes, still lifes, landscapes, interiors portraits, etc. It didn’t take long before I began to follow my most active interests, which were the nudes and the still lifes.” (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, Shinjuku, Tom Wesselmann: A Retrospective Survey 1959-1992, 1993, p. 21) Further inspiration was derived from his new and fulfilling relationship with Claire Selley whom he met in 1957 and who would be his wife from 1963 until his death in 2004. Wesselmann’s youthful nudes – most often blonde like Claire – were generalized types, exhibiting little by way of identifying feature other than hair, mouth, nipples, hands and feet.  Yet in their poses, whether relaxed or blatantly sexual, the nudes were the most effective means of addressing his subjective emotions in the cool, anonymous overtones of the Pop aesthetic.

By the mid-1960s, the artist focused more on the nude herself in close-up detail, with often upper torso, hair, breasts and mouth as her remaining features, with little or no hint remaining of the setting around her. By the mid- to late-1960s, the artist intensified his reductive compositions even further by concentrating in obsessive detail on single attributes of the nude – a monumental foot or a single breast in profile in the Seascape series and finally the red lips in the Mouth paintings.  One of the smallest yet most seductive features of Wesselmann’s nudes is now isolated and magnified into shaped canvases begun in 1965.  Intriguingly, this development was linked to the Still Life series of the early 1960s which was ironically devoid of human presence.  As elaborated by Slim Stealingworth (the pseudonym under which Wesselmann penned a 1980 monograph on his oeuvre), the artist identified a major shift “from a complex to a simple image concept” when he began to incorporate actual objects into his Still Life series and Interior series. “Wesselmann now became more interested in narrowing the context and isolating them. This led to what he viewed as an image concept rather than a painting concept, and inevitably he became less interested in maintaining the integrity of the painting and more interested in the integrity of the image. Rather than making the whole painting as physically intense as possible, it was more a question of making the image as intense as possible.” (Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 40)

The power of the image of Mouth #3 is conveyed in the hyper-realistic scale of the mouth which finds its corollary in the concurrent trends toward grander proportions in the movements of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field of the 1960s. Yet, in the paintings of the mid-1960s as opposed to the monumental Smokers of the 1970s, Wesselmann does not over exaggerate Mouth #3 to cartoonish scale.  The canvas size is still relative to the figure of the viewer and the sculptural quality of the shaped canvas maintains a sense of realism and graphic clarity in the depicted lips and teeth.  As the artist wrote in the guise of Slim Stealingworth, Wesselmann believed that his work was “consistently successful at achieving a maximum of visual intensity while also maintaining some semblance of realism.” (Ibid., p.79)