Beschreibung:

Tom Wesselmann Preliminary Painting for Tit and Telephone 1968 oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 36 in. (72.4 x 91.4 cm) Signed, titled and dated "PRELIMINARY BEDROOM PAINTING FOR TIT AND TELEPHONE 1968 Wesselmann" on the reverse stretcher bar; further signed and dated "Wesselmann 68" lower left.
Provenance Francis and Sydney Lewis Collection, Richmond, acquired from the artist, 1969 Private Collection, California Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York Private Collection Exhibited Lynchburg, Maier Museum of Art at Randolph Macon Woman's College, Realism in a Post-Modern World: Selections from the Sydney and Frances Lewis Collection Catalogue Essay “The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art. I think I have succeeded, but there is still a lot further to go.” Tom Wesselmann 1985 In a vibrant hard-edge style, Wesselmann depicts a still life in an intimate tableau: a bouquet of roses, a zesty orange, a cerulean telephone and a woman’s breast crowd the picture plane, each element intimately magnified. Preliminary Painting for Tit and Telephone combines both still life and nude, Wesselmann’s two major fascinations after his conscious decision to move away from abstraction in 1959. Along with Warhol, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein, Wesselmann felt that he had little to add to the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism and instead turned to figuration and the visual potential of popular imagery as a means of finding a new direction. He did not wish to overturn the traditional notions of painting and actually regarded himself as a formalist rather than a Pop iconoclast. "When I made the decision in 1959 that I was not going to be an abstract painter, that I was going to be a representational painter, I had absolutely no enthusiasm about any particular subject or direction or anything. I was starting from absolute zero. And in choosing representational painting, I decided to do, as my subject matter, the history of art: I would do nudes, still lives, landscapes, interiors, portraits, etc. It didn't take long before I began to follow my most active interests: nudes and still lives." (T. Wesselmann, quoted in Marco Livingstone, "Telling it like it is", Tom Wesselmann exh. cat., 1996, p. 10.) As a sole still life, it is brilliantly constructed—the orange’s perfectly rotund shape echoes the rounded breast and nipple—rendering all aspects of it inanimate. Such inanimacy in human form at first seems misogynistic, offensive by removing the woman’s subjectivity. But in his autobiographical monograph under the alter-ego guise of Slim Stealingworth, Wesselmann wrote, “Personality would interfere with the bluntness of the fact of the nude. When body features were included, they were those important to erotic simplification, like lips and nipples. There was no modelling, no hint at dimension. Simply drawn lines were virtually a collage element- the addition of drawing to the painting. Historically, the nude as a subject has a somewhat intimate and personal relationship to the viewer. Wesselmann’s nudes transcended these characteristics. They abandoned human relationships and as a presence became more blunt and aggressive.” (S. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann 1980, New York, pp. 23-24). Truly, Wesselmann transformed the female nude into a symbol of Pop Art and sexual liberation of the 1960s. In the same way that Andy Warhol rendered the soup can to both higher meaning and meaninglessness, Wesselmann’s incessant reiterations of the nude through the lens of Pop at once dehumanizes the body as well as elevates it. Although Wesselmann’s nudes may be critiqued as lacking autonomy through their absence of identity, in Preliminary Painting for Tit and Telephone, the breast functions as equally an autonomous object as the telephone, in that it is not part of the larger woman. In this way, the nude expands to still life: it is representational, but also just what it is—an object. By removing it of its seductive mystique it becomes that much more sexualized. And yet, paradoxically, it is removed of the sexual by being removed from the body. Wesselmann has remarked upon that metonymy he created: “The tit took the place of the nude in effect [and] was the whole subject of the painting.