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Lot Essay
'It would be hard not to recognize in Wesselmann’s works his intense creative imagination, his chromatic force, and a perceptive illusion that leads back to the works of Edouard Vuillard: an absorbing background that envelops the figure, plunging it into wallpaper-like patterns and overriding perspective in a single chromatic vortex.' DANILO ECCHER
Big Study for Long Delayed Nude is a masterful large-scale painting by Tom Wesselmann, painted in his inimitable clean, lush, Pop-inflected style. The titular nude lies spread-eagled on her back, her mouth open in ecstasy. Her pink lips, erect nipples, tan lines and gleaming teeth are picked out with tender clarity, while her face is smooth, with eyes and nose elided. Her deep brown hair flows into an environment of sensual surface and enticing colour: a leopard-print bedspread, cushions of velvety green and orange. In the background are a suggestive floral trio of daffodil, orchid and rose, a perfume bottle, a tissue box and framed picture of a woman’s face. The outlines of these objects give way to white negative space, a ‘cut-out’ mode of composition that links the work to the shaped canvases Wesselmann employed for his 'Mouth' and 'Smoker' series of the same decade. With its beguiling interplay of fabric and skin, of intimate domesticity and unabashed eroticism, Big Study for Long Delayed Nude captures Wesselmann’s unique approach to the Pop imagery and sexual politics of the 1960s. The woman luxuriates alone in the consumerist hedonism of her material world, and Wesselmann’s vibrant, lavish painting conveys an atmosphere of rich personal pleasure.
Wesselmann’s iconic Great American Nudes and Bedroom Paintings glow with all the seductive beauty of the American Dream. At the dawn of a liberated age in which sex became a luxury commodity, in tandem with the exuberant colour and form of packaged consumer goods – cigarettes, beer bottles, orange juice advertisements – Wesselmann found fertile ground in the crossover between sex and material desires. His overriding formalist concerns with composition led to a depersonalised treatment of his subject matter, omitting faces and distinctive features in a stylised vocabulary of erogenous symbols. ‘If all positive and negative areas became as strong as possible,’ he once said, ‘there would be no negative areas; the image could become one strong positive shape. What counted was that one final shape’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in T. Shinoda, ‘Drawings without Paper’ in Tom Wesselmann Recent Still Lifes and Landscapes, exh. cat. Galerie Tokoro, Tokyo 1991).
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). Works such as Big Study for Long Delayed Nude offered overtly sexual women alongside ciphers for American consumer opulence, arranged together in interiors of seductive, optimistic bright colour and sensuous form. These pictures not only reflected the cultural 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. Despite the depersonalisation of the female body, this rich celebration of sex, style and colour is suffused with the joy and love of the artist’s own life, and captures the central tenet of Wesselmann’s art: ‘I’m still in favour of beauty; good, old-fashioned, no-holdsbarred beauty’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in J. McEwen, Tom Wesselmann: Paintings 1962–1986, exh. cat. Mayor Gallery, London 1988, unpaged).
Big Study for Long Delayed Nude is a masterful large-scale painting by Tom Wesselmann, painted in his inimitable clean, lush, Pop-inflected style. The titular nude lies spread-eagled on her back, her mouth open in ecstasy. Her pink lips, erect nipples, tan lines and gleaming teeth are picked out with tender clarity, while her face is smooth, with eyes and nose elided. Her deep brown hair flows into an environment of sensual surface and enticing colour: a leopard-print bedspread, cushions of velvety green and orange. In the background are a suggestive floral trio of daffodil, orchid and rose, a perfume bottle, a tissue box and framed picture of a woman’s face. The outlines of these objects give way to white negative space, a ‘cut-out’ mode of composition that links the work to the shaped canvases Wesselmann employed for his 'Mouth' and 'Smoker' series of the same decade. With its beguiling interplay of fabric and skin, of intimate domesticity and unabashed eroticism, Big Study for Long Delayed Nude captures Wesselmann’s unique approach to the Pop imagery and sexual politics of the 1960s. The woman luxuriates alone in the consumerist hedonism of her material world, and Wesselmann’s vibrant, lavish painting conveys an atmosphere of rich personal pleasure.
Wesselmann’s iconic Great American Nudes and Bedroom Paintings glow with all the seductive beauty of the American Dream. At the dawn of a liberated age in which sex became a luxury commodity, in tandem with the exuberant colour and form of packaged consumer goods – cigarettes, beer bottles, orange juice advertisements – Wesselmann found fertile ground in the crossover between sex and material desires. His overriding formalist concerns with composition led to a depersonalised treatment of his subject matter, omitting faces and distinctive features in a stylised vocabulary of erogenous symbols. ‘If all positive and negative areas became as strong as possible,’ he once said, ‘there would be no negative areas; the image could become one strong positive shape. What counted was that one final shape’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in T. Shinoda, ‘Drawings without Paper’ in Tom Wesselmann Recent Still Lifes and Landscapes, exh. cat. Galerie Tokoro, Tokyo 1991).
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). Works such as Big Study for Long Delayed Nude offered overtly sexual women alongside ciphers for American consumer opulence, arranged together in interiors of seductive, optimistic bright colour and sensuous form. These pictures not only reflected the cultural 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. Despite the depersonalisation of the female body, this rich celebration of sex, style and colour is suffused with the joy and love of the artist’s own life, and captures the central tenet of Wesselmann’s art: ‘I’m still in favour of beauty; good, old-fashioned, no-holdsbarred beauty’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in J. McEwen, Tom Wesselmann: Paintings 1962–1986, exh. cat. Mayor Gallery, London 1988, unpaged).