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Lot Essay
Tom Wesselmann's paintings, particularly his breakthrough Pop works from the 1960's, such as Seascape #9, 1966, are increasingly being seen as some of the most provocative of their time, as well as speaking to a contemporary audience. From his earliest works which incorporated collaged elements of popular culture into paintings indebted to Matisse and Bonnard, Wesselmann has been widely exhibited and collected. With the recent rise of importance of figurative and unabashedly erotically charged contemporary artists such as John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, Wesselmann is more relevant than ever. His recent unfortunate passing has spurred a number of prominent exhibitions, which has underscored his standing as one of the giants of Post-War as well as Contemporary art.
Dissatisfied with how his oeuvre was discussed and misinterpreted, in 1980 Wesselmann took the unusual approach of writing his own monograph, under the nom de plume Slim Stealingworth. Articulate and free from the pretentious jargon of most art criticism, writing in the third person, Wesselmann explained the genesis of his works in which the female foot was the primary subject.
"Early in 1965 Wesselmann made the first foot paintings. This subject was provoked when Wesselmann in Great American Nude #58 used a collage woman, cut from a subway poster. He used all but the feet. This pair of feet hung around the studio and had an irresistible presence. They became the focus of a small collage, Little Seascape #1. The idea of a big foot as the main element of a painting, taking the place of a full figure, became very exicting to Wesselmann; and he began a series of foot paintings...
And some of the feet he worked from he found to be profoundly beautiful and very exciting to build a painting around. All of these earlier feet were limited to the outdoors, and specifically the seaside. The seascape sitution was used because Wesselmann had recently discovered vacations. A number of watercolor studies for the ocean and beach around Truro, Massachusetts, grew out of a two-week Cape Cod vacation. While these studies played only a small but direct part in the paintings, they did focus his attention and awareness on the sea...
In the seascapes and in most of the nudes of the mid-1960's, the most widely used medium was acrylics-synthetic acrylic polymer emulsion. The technique Wesselmann evolved was to paint the image with many thinned-out layers, often painting the painting as many as eight times. Broad flat areas would get sprayed-on finishing coasts to give a flawless surface" (T. Wesselmann as Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, pp. 44-47).
Dissatisfied with how his oeuvre was discussed and misinterpreted, in 1980 Wesselmann took the unusual approach of writing his own monograph, under the nom de plume Slim Stealingworth. Articulate and free from the pretentious jargon of most art criticism, writing in the third person, Wesselmann explained the genesis of his works in which the female foot was the primary subject.
"Early in 1965 Wesselmann made the first foot paintings. This subject was provoked when Wesselmann in Great American Nude #58 used a collage woman, cut from a subway poster. He used all but the feet. This pair of feet hung around the studio and had an irresistible presence. They became the focus of a small collage, Little Seascape #1. The idea of a big foot as the main element of a painting, taking the place of a full figure, became very exicting to Wesselmann; and he began a series of foot paintings...
And some of the feet he worked from he found to be profoundly beautiful and very exciting to build a painting around. All of these earlier feet were limited to the outdoors, and specifically the seaside. The seascape sitution was used because Wesselmann had recently discovered vacations. A number of watercolor studies for the ocean and beach around Truro, Massachusetts, grew out of a two-week Cape Cod vacation. While these studies played only a small but direct part in the paintings, they did focus his attention and awareness on the sea...
In the seascapes and in most of the nudes of the mid-1960's, the most widely used medium was acrylics-synthetic acrylic polymer emulsion. The technique Wesselmann evolved was to paint the image with many thinned-out layers, often painting the painting as many as eight times. Broad flat areas would get sprayed-on finishing coasts to give a flawless surface" (T. Wesselmann as Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, pp. 44-47).