Tom Wesselmann

Green Gallery, New York
Sonja de Zorrilla, New York
Christie's, New York, May 11, 2004, lot 66
Private Collection

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Beyond Pop: Tom Wesselmann, May - October 2012, p. 24, illustrated

This work is in very good condition overall. There is some light wear and handling to the extreme edges of the board. There is an unobtrusive line of craquelure above the figures right breast and some scattered pinpoint accretions. The yellow fabric underneath the figure is slightly worn with some pulls to the fabric. The oval board is mounted to a rectangular board. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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1963, the year Great American Nude #46 was executed, saw a rise of popular mass media with a proliferation of seductive images of modern marvels and creature comforts that stoked consumer desire, and the accumulation of commodities was no longer merely a sign of success and power, it had become synonymous with the American Dream. Within the crucible of this consumerist economy, tremendous social change would dramatically shift the cultural direction of the United States over the course of the decade.  

That year, a professional illustrator, sign painter, college professor and former Army cartoonist named Tom Wesselmann would each have gallery exhibitions in New York City that, collectively, would mark the beginning of Pop art. It was Tom Wesselman’s epic Great American Nude series that would launch both his artistic career and establish his place as one of the founding members of the movement.

The dawn of the decade had presented many artists with the choice of either continuing the Abstract Expressionists' practice, whose continued isolation from contemporary culture would ultimately lead to the movement’s undoing, or invent a new visual language that, as Robert Rauschenberg advocated for in 1959, merged art and life. Undoubtedly the commercial backgrounds of many Pop artists swayed their decision in favor of the latter and, as Andy Warhol explained, their intent was to look at “all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” (Andy Warhol in ‘POPism: The Warhol Sixties,’ Harper & Row, New York, 1983, p. 3)

With his Great American Nude series, perhaps more so than any other Pop artist, Wesselmann successfully merged the modernist sensibilities of the nascent movement into a cohesive whole. A satiric take on The Great American Novel and The Great American Dream, Wesselmann’s title for the series was intended to foreclose unintended interpretation of the images and manifest the same sly wit that marked his comic strips.  With each piece, he sought to generate the same visceral drama and powerful confrontation found in the greatest Abstract Expressionist works, but with a visual logic predicated on American contemporary visual culture. Wesselmann’s nudes, still-lifes, and landscapes would revitalize these traditional motifs of Western painting through modernist idioms while simultaneously acknowledging this artistic lineage. 

As exemplified in Great American Nude #46, Wesselmann snatched objects from readily available American mass media to create all-over compositions that rejected illusionistic space and harnessed the imbrication of objects against a background, which had been integral to modernism. Unlike other collagists such as British artist Richard Hamilton, Wesselmann did not attempt to recreate a three-dimensional space. Indeed, the objects and forms in Great American Nude #46 appear wholly on the surface. The collage of items, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit, oversized blue stars, along with various fabrics do not recede into space but draw the spectator’s gaze towards the flat color field of the female nude. Wesselman incorporated felt, velvet and other materials into the composition that have an inherent tangible depth and tactility, but paradoxically increase the vertical flatness of the image and anticipate his later work boldly composed of physical objects rather than their simulacra or mass media representations. The composition is framed with all-American blue stars and a view of "beautiful for spacious skies."

In Great American Nude #46, the nude lithely rests on a bed, with just a sly suggestion of her hand in her undergarments. The sequence of organic curves that cascades across the space describes the female form with minimum elaboration and subtly signifies her eroticism. Indeed, the only hints of color or detail are in the nude's lips, nipples and hair, accenting the figure's sensuality and further objectifying her. According to Wesselmann, facial features would imbue the figure with a personality and detract from his carefully constructed visual arrangement, and thus her visage is reduced to a carnal mouth.  Compositionally, the large field of skin tone appears, like Klimt’s Danaë, to both emerge from the background and to be engulfed by it.

Over the course of his career, no motif would become more closely associated with Wesselmann’s work than the female nude. It was a strategy used to address his own sexual preoccupations and for replicating the confrontational power found in de Kooning’s women, which he greatly admired. However, the importance of this strategy declined as the depictions became more explicit. Nevertheless, it was this increasing explicitness and the denied identity of the female figures that would serve to generate unintended controversy as the sexual revolution of the 1960s transitioned into second-wave feminism of the 1970s.