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Lot Essay
‘I’m terribly excited about those [metal works]… I find sometimes I get so excited working, especially when starting new ideas; I get so excited that I get uncomfortable. It almost feels dangerous, like I’m flirting with something dangerous. Sometimes I’ve gotten so excited that I’ll come home early – just too exciting. I had to get out of here; I couldn’t stand it.’ TOM WESSELMANN
An electric riot of colours and contours, Tom Wesselmann’s Monica with Wesselmann demonstrates a mature mastering of the artist’s work in laser-cut, painted metal. The loose formation and sketchy thickness of the painted aluminium displays a creative idiosyncrasy particular to Wesselmann, as though he is drawing or painting with the metal itself. Wesselmann’s metal work marks a culminative peak in his technical prowess. He worked exceptionally hard as a draughtsman in his studio – five or six days a week in earlier years – and was immensely disciplined in his production of preparatory studies. In 1983 he produced his first fabricated hand-cut aluminium ‘drawings’. Experimenting at his foundry (Lippincott, Inc., in New Haven, Connecticut), Wesselmann made huge advances in producing metal works that replicated and retained a sense of his signature gesture. With developments in computer-technology, he became able to combine fabrication with painting, before producing a series of undulating, colourful, thrillingly vibrant assemblages.
Throughout his career, Wesselmann delivered a staggering body of work depicting the female sitter; the subject here is Monica, an artist and long-term assistant who sat for Wesselmann from the mid-1980s. Monica poses against a vividly colourful background of semi-abstract squiggles. The salmon lines of the nude Monica settle seductively against this patterned network, with the pinky redness of the sitter’s nipples and lips intensifying the erotic intimacy of the ensemble. Monica’s blue fedora hat and black hair bring foregrounded definition to this relaxed portrayal. In many of Wesselmann’s other portraits, he sets the sitter against work by his modernist muses – Mondrian, Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse – and perhaps, with the still-life here, he evokes the colourful palette and sensual curvaceousness inherent in the cut-outs of the latter. However, considering other Wesselmann pieces refer to these artists in their titles (for example, Monica Sitting with Mondrian), here the eponymous reference to Wesselmann implies that the sitter is set against a still life of his own, conjuring a witty, tongue-in-cheek mise en abyme that playfully supports the light nature of the piece.
The wall behind the work performs a key role in its function, its negative space completing the forms of Monica’s face, torso and legs. Wesselmann maintained that these works were dependent on the negative space of the wall, with the environment becoming a continuation of the work itself; he explained that ‘I was trying to test a specific idea, to let the lines continue in space outside the image on the wall… I discovered that even in metal the drawing gesture could leave the painting’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat. Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, 2005, p. 256). Included in this negative space, and recalling a key feature in many of his hand-drawn portraits, Wesselmann chose to omit the eyes of the sitter, lending her a sense of anonymity and letting our imagination complete the work. J. A. Abramson has interpreted this exclusion as a deliberate attempt to focus the attention away from the individual subject, remarking that to Wesselmann, ‘she is Woman; and the paintings begin, in an unspecific, non-portrait fashion, with her and are immediately extended to representations of generalized Woman’ (J. A. Abramson, ‘Tom Wesselmann and the Gates of Horn’, Arts Magazine, May 1966, p. 46). The dichotomy between positive and negative space creates a sensual interplay of light and shade, colour and neutrality, reinforcing the bold, sexy seductiveness of the subject. By mastering this manipulation of metal into loud colour and slinky form, Monica with Wesselmann represents a lifetime’s dedication to the artist’s study of the female nude, climactically worked in a highly individualised, irresistibly animated style.
An electric riot of colours and contours, Tom Wesselmann’s Monica with Wesselmann demonstrates a mature mastering of the artist’s work in laser-cut, painted metal. The loose formation and sketchy thickness of the painted aluminium displays a creative idiosyncrasy particular to Wesselmann, as though he is drawing or painting with the metal itself. Wesselmann’s metal work marks a culminative peak in his technical prowess. He worked exceptionally hard as a draughtsman in his studio – five or six days a week in earlier years – and was immensely disciplined in his production of preparatory studies. In 1983 he produced his first fabricated hand-cut aluminium ‘drawings’. Experimenting at his foundry (Lippincott, Inc., in New Haven, Connecticut), Wesselmann made huge advances in producing metal works that replicated and retained a sense of his signature gesture. With developments in computer-technology, he became able to combine fabrication with painting, before producing a series of undulating, colourful, thrillingly vibrant assemblages.
Throughout his career, Wesselmann delivered a staggering body of work depicting the female sitter; the subject here is Monica, an artist and long-term assistant who sat for Wesselmann from the mid-1980s. Monica poses against a vividly colourful background of semi-abstract squiggles. The salmon lines of the nude Monica settle seductively against this patterned network, with the pinky redness of the sitter’s nipples and lips intensifying the erotic intimacy of the ensemble. Monica’s blue fedora hat and black hair bring foregrounded definition to this relaxed portrayal. In many of Wesselmann’s other portraits, he sets the sitter against work by his modernist muses – Mondrian, Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse – and perhaps, with the still-life here, he evokes the colourful palette and sensual curvaceousness inherent in the cut-outs of the latter. However, considering other Wesselmann pieces refer to these artists in their titles (for example, Monica Sitting with Mondrian), here the eponymous reference to Wesselmann implies that the sitter is set against a still life of his own, conjuring a witty, tongue-in-cheek mise en abyme that playfully supports the light nature of the piece.
The wall behind the work performs a key role in its function, its negative space completing the forms of Monica’s face, torso and legs. Wesselmann maintained that these works were dependent on the negative space of the wall, with the environment becoming a continuation of the work itself; he explained that ‘I was trying to test a specific idea, to let the lines continue in space outside the image on the wall… I discovered that even in metal the drawing gesture could leave the painting’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat. Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, 2005, p. 256). Included in this negative space, and recalling a key feature in many of his hand-drawn portraits, Wesselmann chose to omit the eyes of the sitter, lending her a sense of anonymity and letting our imagination complete the work. J. A. Abramson has interpreted this exclusion as a deliberate attempt to focus the attention away from the individual subject, remarking that to Wesselmann, ‘she is Woman; and the paintings begin, in an unspecific, non-portrait fashion, with her and are immediately extended to representations of generalized Woman’ (J. A. Abramson, ‘Tom Wesselmann and the Gates of Horn’, Arts Magazine, May 1966, p. 46). The dichotomy between positive and negative space creates a sensual interplay of light and shade, colour and neutrality, reinforcing the bold, sexy seductiveness of the subject. By mastering this manipulation of metal into loud colour and slinky form, Monica with Wesselmann represents a lifetime’s dedication to the artist’s study of the female nude, climactically worked in a highly individualised, irresistibly animated style.