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Lot Essay
One of the towering and essential masters of the Pop Art movement, Tom Wesselmann joyfully reimagines the classical nude in the mode of mid-20th Century American consumer culture. Bedroom Painting #52 is an alluring example from Wesselmann’s iconic Bedroom Paintings of nude studies set in various interior settings. Although he veered away from still life in the mid-1960s, Wesselmann returned to this motif in 1967 via the Bedroom Paintings. The complex reverberations between body parts and still life imagery opened up new possibilities to Wesselmann, as evidenced in the present work.
Wesselmann's "Drop Out" works, as he refers to this series, play a game with the viewer. The term "Drop Out" literally references a process of removing or cutting out, in this case, a portion of the figure's form. In Bedroom Painting #52, the woman's breast is partially cut out and defined instead by negative space. The subject is presented on a grand scale, in profile, against a bedroom window, flowing curtains and flower. The negative space creates a silhouette of the woman's form to give the illusion of a body, yet Wesselmann has only painted a nipple and a few strands of brown hair. "Although the shape of the canvas is pre-determined at the very beginning of the creative process, the pictures give the impression that the body contours have been cut out at some later point. The oversized body parts seem robbed of their connotative significance, their symbolic meaning, as if they had been created exclusively for the sake of the perspective-bound illusion of a 'see-through' effect" (T. Buchsteiner and O. Letze, eds., Tom Wesselmann, Ostfildern, 1996, p. 37). By fragmenting the female form in this manner, Wesselmann projects a spirit of exuberance and sense of fun to his otherwise erotic subject that reflects the buoyance and exhilaration of the era when it was created. The viewer plays Peek-A-Boo with the artist himself and his revelatory process of reinventing the nude through positive and negative space.
Wesselmann's "Drop Out" works, as he refers to this series, play a game with the viewer. The term "Drop Out" literally references a process of removing or cutting out, in this case, a portion of the figure's form. In Bedroom Painting #52, the woman's breast is partially cut out and defined instead by negative space. The subject is presented on a grand scale, in profile, against a bedroom window, flowing curtains and flower. The negative space creates a silhouette of the woman's form to give the illusion of a body, yet Wesselmann has only painted a nipple and a few strands of brown hair. "Although the shape of the canvas is pre-determined at the very beginning of the creative process, the pictures give the impression that the body contours have been cut out at some later point. The oversized body parts seem robbed of their connotative significance, their symbolic meaning, as if they had been created exclusively for the sake of the perspective-bound illusion of a 'see-through' effect" (T. Buchsteiner and O. Letze, eds., Tom Wesselmann, Ostfildern, 1996, p. 37). By fragmenting the female form in this manner, Wesselmann projects a spirit of exuberance and sense of fun to his otherwise erotic subject that reflects the buoyance and exhilaration of the era when it was created. The viewer plays Peek-A-Boo with the artist himself and his revelatory process of reinventing the nude through positive and negative space.