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Lot 3465 - A197 PostWar & Contemporary - Thursday, 01. July 2021, 05.00 PM

TOM WESSELMANN

(Cincinnati 1931–2004 New York)
Pastel-Nude on the beach. Ca. 1965.
Pastel and graphite on paper.
Signed and dated lower right: Wesselmann ca. 65, as well as signed, dated and numbered on the reverse: Wesselmann ca. 65. D6533 #359.
19.7 × 23.2 cm.

Provenance:
- Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (directly acquired from the artist).
- Private collection since 1997.
- Sotheby's, New York, auction 15 May 2013, lot 258.
- Acquired from the above by the present owner, since then private collection Switzerland.

Exhibitions: New York 2010, Tom Wesselmann: Paintings, Steel Drawings, Works on Paper, Maquettes. David Janis Gallery, March - May.

Tom Wesselmann repeatedly drew on the images, commodities and desires of American everyday culture in his oeuvre. He created his first cartoons out of boredom while serving on the home front during the Korean War. Later, small-format abstract collages followed, reflecting the influences of Henri Matisse and Willem de Kooning.

The motif of the "Great American Nudes" developed by Wesselmann in the early 60s proved to be a resounding success, henceforth becoming his trademark and used by him in various permutations for years. "I like to think that my work is about all kinds of pleasures." With this apparently innocuous sentence, Wesselmann indicated that his nude paintings reflect the pleasure usually sought in the erotic motif of the female nude. By deliberately mixing mass media clichés with genres and motifs from the artistic pictorial tradition, and using techniques of the avant-garde, Wesselmann broke with old conventions of erotic representation.

In contrast to Henri Matisse, who inspired him and who used subtly nuanced eroticism, Wesselmann consciously made it sexually provocative. He staged his figures - first his wife Claire, and from the early 1980s his assistant Monica Serra - as objects of lust, their nipples and genitals highlighted by bikini tan lines, reducing them to mere surfaces onto which ideas are projected. Since Wesselmann’s aesthetic gaze always took precedence, he usually placed his nude models in elaborate interiors, for instance in front of gathered curtains or overflowing fruit bowls.

In the present work, the lady seems to be looking directly into the viewer's face. Apart from that, Wesselmann presents his model as flat and cool, without face or identity, depriving her of any individuality, nor allowing her to tell her story. The only feature to break through this coolness is the red smiling mouth with gleaming white perfectly aligned teeth, which can be found again and again in Tom Wesselmann’s works from 1961 onwards.

"For many years, drawing, especially from the nude, was a desperate attempt to capture something significant of the beauty of the woman I was confronted with. It was always frustrating because the beauty of the woman is so elusive." Tom Wesselmann


CHF 50 000 / 70 000 | (€ 51 550 / 72 160)

Sold for CHF 71 060 (including buyer’s premium)
All information is subject to change.