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Lot Essay
‘The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art’
TOM WESSELMANN
‘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’s Mouth Fragments (1973) form an elegant and powerful suite of four paintings, each displaying an open, expressive female mouth hovering in white space. Red lips, white teeth and soft glimpses of tongue are revealed in subtly different expressions: these sensuous cut-out forms seem to imply an offscreen act, yet Wesselmann’s intense focus blanks out any narrative or scenery, isolating each mouth as a solo erogenous zone, the only object of his gaze. This mode of composition links the paintings to Wesselmann’s play with negative space in his Great American Nude works of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to the bigger shaped canvases he employed for his large-scale Mouth works, begun in 1965, and the related Smoker series. Distilling the faceless women of the Great American Nude to a single unit of pictorial vocabulary, Wesselmann’s act of disembodiment is a potent one, allowing him to present the mouth not as part of an individual but as icon, symbol, emblem in itself. Made as recognisable as Warhol’s soup cans or Coke bottles, the mouth even takes on the iconic qualities of the logo or branded product. These works thus find their place in the artist’s seamless exploration of the inextricable relationship between consumerism and desire, and, ultimately, between the American Dream and sex.
Unambiguously erotic, Wesselmann’s works have also always been about eroticism: what it means, how it is conveyed, and how it is bound up with contemporary culture. In an apt instance of life imitating art, his Mouth works have featured in a number of cosmetic advertisements, including Revlon’s ‘Irresistible Lips’ campaign and Alexandra de Markoff’s 1995 campaign ‘Lips Like Hers,’ which depicted a disembodied pair of lips next to a ‘fully extended lipstick, its phallic role obvious’ (J. Wilmerding, Tom Wesselmann: His Voice and Vision, New York 2008, p. 127). The earlier Great American Nude works offered overtly sexual nude women alongside products and symbols of American consumerism, arranged together in interiors of seductive, optimistic bright colour and sensuous shape. These pictures not only reflected the Pop culture landscape of the time, but also Wesselmann’s fulfilling new relationship with Claire Selley, whom he met in 1957 and would marry six years later. The women, however, had always been faceless, and Wesselmann’s work would become only more depersonalised as he refined his vision and sharpened his focus. In a pseudonymous monograph published in 1980, he reflected that as he began to incorporate real objects into his still-lifes and interiors, he made a shift ‘from a complex to a simple image concept;’ he ‘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’ (S. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 40). Works such as Mouth Fragments are the striking result of this quest for intensity of image, and stand as jewel-like icons of Wesselmann’s unmistakable Pop practice.
TOM WESSELMANN
‘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’s Mouth Fragments (1973) form an elegant and powerful suite of four paintings, each displaying an open, expressive female mouth hovering in white space. Red lips, white teeth and soft glimpses of tongue are revealed in subtly different expressions: these sensuous cut-out forms seem to imply an offscreen act, yet Wesselmann’s intense focus blanks out any narrative or scenery, isolating each mouth as a solo erogenous zone, the only object of his gaze. This mode of composition links the paintings to Wesselmann’s play with negative space in his Great American Nude works of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to the bigger shaped canvases he employed for his large-scale Mouth works, begun in 1965, and the related Smoker series. Distilling the faceless women of the Great American Nude to a single unit of pictorial vocabulary, Wesselmann’s act of disembodiment is a potent one, allowing him to present the mouth not as part of an individual but as icon, symbol, emblem in itself. Made as recognisable as Warhol’s soup cans or Coke bottles, the mouth even takes on the iconic qualities of the logo or branded product. These works thus find their place in the artist’s seamless exploration of the inextricable relationship between consumerism and desire, and, ultimately, between the American Dream and sex.
Unambiguously erotic, Wesselmann’s works have also always been about eroticism: what it means, how it is conveyed, and how it is bound up with contemporary culture. In an apt instance of life imitating art, his Mouth works have featured in a number of cosmetic advertisements, including Revlon’s ‘Irresistible Lips’ campaign and Alexandra de Markoff’s 1995 campaign ‘Lips Like Hers,’ which depicted a disembodied pair of lips next to a ‘fully extended lipstick, its phallic role obvious’ (J. Wilmerding, Tom Wesselmann: His Voice and Vision, New York 2008, p. 127). The earlier Great American Nude works offered overtly sexual nude women alongside products and symbols of American consumerism, arranged together in interiors of seductive, optimistic bright colour and sensuous shape. These pictures not only reflected the Pop culture landscape of the time, but also Wesselmann’s fulfilling new relationship with Claire Selley, whom he met in 1957 and would marry six years later. The women, however, had always been faceless, and Wesselmann’s work would become only more depersonalised as he refined his vision and sharpened his focus. In a pseudonymous monograph published in 1980, he reflected that as he began to incorporate real objects into his still-lifes and interiors, he made a shift ‘from a complex to a simple image concept;’ he ‘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’ (S. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 40). Works such as Mouth Fragments are the striking result of this quest for intensity of image, and stand as jewel-like icons of Wesselmann’s unmistakable Pop practice.