Smoker

Silky white smoke billows from a woman’s lipsticked, open mouth; elegant fingers hold the cigarette before her, nails agleam with pink polish. Hand, mouth and smoke float together in blank space, crisp-edged as a paper cut-out. Smoker (1979) is an alluring example of one of Tom Wesselmann’s most celebrated series. In his ‘Great American Nudes’ of the 1960s, he had combined objects like cigarettes and Coca-Cola bottles with nude women in attitudes of languorous bliss. Gradually, he began to depict the nudes alone, and then to isolate individual elements of them with near-fetishistic focus. Inspired by one of his models taking a cigarette break, the ‘Smokers’ were their ultimate sensual distillation. They have become erotic icons of American Pop. At their largest, these smoking mouths—with manicured hands introduced in the 1970s—appeared on shaped canvases the size of billboards: the present work explores the same motif on an intimate scale.

In a liberated age flooded with the exuberant colours of advertising and Abstract Expressionism alike, Wesselmann—a one-time student of Willem de Kooning—found fertile ground in the crossover between sex and consumerist pleasure. Unlike the detached approach taken to mass-media subject matter by artists like Andy Warhol, his pictures were brazenly luxuriant. In works like Smoker, he engaged in constant compositional innovation, creating a schematic vocabulary as seductive as it was formally audacious. ‘If all positive and negative areas became as strong as possible,’ he once explained, ‘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).