Bedroom Painting #15; Wesselmann (1968 - 1970)
From the Chrysler Museum of Art Website:
Date: 1968-70
Related People:
Artist: Tom Wesselmann
American, 1931-2004
Dimensions: Overall: 84 1/4 x 119 1/4 in. (214 x 302.9 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Credit Line: Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Description: This oil on canvas painting is irregulary-shaped and combines still-life objects with a woman's foot with painted toenails. The foot lines the bottom edge of the canvas, the ball of the foot resting on a round, yellow pillow. An orange, a rose, a portrait of a lover (self-portrait of Wesselmann) is in the background. The contour of the canvas is shaped to fit the objects depicted.
Among the most irreverent and playful of post-World War II aesthetics, Pop art came to the fore in England and America in the late 1950s and over the next decade gained acceptance as a major style. Reacting to the abstract and subjective pictorial language of the Abstract Expressionists (see object 83.592), America's Pop artists embraced figuration and devised a readily accessible vocabulary of forms drawn from popular culture. Like James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol (see objects 71.699, 71.676, 81.39), Tom Wesselmann made liberal use of the "throw-away" imagery of urban mass culture-as encountered in newspapers, comics, magazines, movies, and television-and often did so to comment ironically on the nature of the erotic impulse in contemporary American life. Wesselmann showed no inclination toward art until he joined the Army and began to try his hand at cartooning. Thereafter he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati was his hometown) and at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he encountered, and ultimately rejected, Abstract Expressionism. His first significant works were small collages in a Cubist vein that juxtaposed his own drawings of female nudes with magazine clippings of soda bottles, food, and other commercial products. With time he abandoned these tiny assemblages for large paintings, though he maintained the bright, slick colors and hard-edge realism of the magazine ads. In 1962 he embarked on his series of Great American Nudes. These brashly colored, monumental canvases feature highly suggestive female nudes in bath or bedroom settings and often incorporated actual objects -telephones, radios, tables, and chairs-in an effort to create a more palpable domestic environment. In 1967 Wesselmann began another series of large-scale canvases, the Bedroom Paintings, in which he pursued his fascination with erotic themes. These highly compressed images combined still-life objects appropriate to the bedroom and redolent of "pop" romance-pillows, lighted cigarettes, roses, oranges, a lover's photograph-with erotically charged parts of the male or female anatomy. As in the Chrysler's Bedroom Painting #15 of 1968-70, the contours of these canvases are often shaped to fit the objects depicted, and thus echo the imagery's sensuously undulating forms. Wesselmann himself noted that in Bedroom Painting #15 he "gave the main role to a huge yellow pillow, and set up a dramatic scale change in the painting, between the pillow and the other elements." The gigantic foot with glossily painted nails serves as a tantalizing reference to an unseen female nude reclining on a bed, and as such it frustrates the viewer's desire to play the voyeur. In fact, Wesselmann reserves this role for himself: it is he who gazes from the photograph at bedside and who alone can "see" all from this privileged vantage point. The Chrysler also possesses two of Wesselmann's preliminary drawings for Bedroom Painting #15, both executed in pencil on paper (see objects 87.508, 87.507). JCH Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 246-247, no. 150.
In Wesselmann's slick, erotic montage, a large yellow pillow, which bears a coy resemblance to a female breast, dominates the composition. Its form is visually echoed by an orange set among such trappings of popular romance as a rose and a lover's photograph. A flushed, pink foot with brightly painted toenails strongly suggests a female body whose huge scale can only be imagined, while the small, framed self-portrait lets us know that the artist himself is gazing upon the scene. With his bright colors and impersonal handling Wesselmann imitates the style of glossy magazine advertising where the commercial and the sexual are blended seamlessly.
Object Number: 77.420
Photo taken September 29th, 2007.
Bedroom Painting #15; Wesselmann (1968 - 1970)
From the Chrysler Museum of Art Website:
Date: 1968-70
Related People:
Artist: Tom Wesselmann
American, 1931-2004
Dimensions: Overall: 84 1/4 x 119 1/4 in. (214 x 302.9 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Credit Line: Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Description: This oil on canvas painting is irregulary-shaped and combines still-life objects with a woman's foot with painted toenails. The foot lines the bottom edge of the canvas, the ball of the foot resting on a round, yellow pillow. An orange, a rose, a portrait of a lover (self-portrait of Wesselmann) is in the background. The contour of the canvas is shaped to fit the objects depicted.
Among the most irreverent and playful of post-World War II aesthetics, Pop art came to the fore in England and America in the late 1950s and over the next decade gained acceptance as a major style. Reacting to the abstract and subjective pictorial language of the Abstract Expressionists (see object 83.592), America's Pop artists embraced figuration and devised a readily accessible vocabulary of forms drawn from popular culture. Like James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol (see objects 71.699, 71.676, 81.39), Tom Wesselmann made liberal use of the "throw-away" imagery of urban mass culture-as encountered in newspapers, comics, magazines, movies, and television-and often did so to comment ironically on the nature of the erotic impulse in contemporary American life. Wesselmann showed no inclination toward art until he joined the Army and began to try his hand at cartooning. Thereafter he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati was his hometown) and at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he encountered, and ultimately rejected, Abstract Expressionism. His first significant works were small collages in a Cubist vein that juxtaposed his own drawings of female nudes with magazine clippings of soda bottles, food, and other commercial products. With time he abandoned these tiny assemblages for large paintings, though he maintained the bright, slick colors and hard-edge realism of the magazine ads. In 1962 he embarked on his series of Great American Nudes. These brashly colored, monumental canvases feature highly suggestive female nudes in bath or bedroom settings and often incorporated actual objects -telephones, radios, tables, and chairs-in an effort to create a more palpable domestic environment. In 1967 Wesselmann began another series of large-scale canvases, the Bedroom Paintings, in which he pursued his fascination with erotic themes. These highly compressed images combined still-life objects appropriate to the bedroom and redolent of "pop" romance-pillows, lighted cigarettes, roses, oranges, a lover's photograph-with erotically charged parts of the male or female anatomy. As in the Chrysler's Bedroom Painting #15 of 1968-70, the contours of these canvases are often shaped to fit the objects depicted, and thus echo the imagery's sensuously undulating forms. Wesselmann himself noted that in Bedroom Painting #15 he "gave the main role to a huge yellow pillow, and set up a dramatic scale change in the painting, between the pillow and the other elements." The gigantic foot with glossily painted nails serves as a tantalizing reference to an unseen female nude reclining on a bed, and as such it frustrates the viewer's desire to play the voyeur. In fact, Wesselmann reserves this role for himself: it is he who gazes from the photograph at bedside and who alone can "see" all from this privileged vantage point. The Chrysler also possesses two of Wesselmann's preliminary drawings for Bedroom Painting #15, both executed in pencil on paper (see objects 87.508, 87.507). JCH Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 246-247, no. 150.
In Wesselmann's slick, erotic montage, a large yellow pillow, which bears a coy resemblance to a female breast, dominates the composition. Its form is visually echoed by an orange set among such trappings of popular romance as a rose and a lover's photograph. A flushed, pink foot with brightly painted toenails strongly suggests a female body whose huge scale can only be imagined, while the small, framed self-portrait lets us know that the artist himself is gazing upon the scene. With his bright colors and impersonal handling Wesselmann imitates the style of glossy magazine advertising where the commercial and the sexual are blended seamlessly.
Object Number: 77.420
Photo taken September 29th, 2007.