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Lot Essay
"In the 1986 Still Life with Fruit, Flowers and Monica, like the earlier Still Life with Fruit, Petunias and Claire, Wesselmann expanded on a device used in his Bedroom series -faces, some portraits and others vacant and iconic, in easel-back frames rest on tables surrounded by such everyday domestic objects as bowls of fruit and vases of flowers.
In those works, enamel on cut-out aluminum, Wesselmann was trying to create a greater sense of complexity, to mix the actual solid color areas of some works with an energetic scribbled line that in others indicated solid areas, for example. For him, the two still lifes tended toward painting more than drawing, a distinction so fascinating that he translated the single subject into both steel and aluminum, just as he often did with other subjects, and also produced compositional variations in both color and black-and-white" (S. Hunter, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1994, pp. 35-36).
In those works, enamel on cut-out aluminum, Wesselmann was trying to create a greater sense of complexity, to mix the actual solid color areas of some works with an energetic scribbled line that in others indicated solid areas, for example. For him, the two still lifes tended toward painting more than drawing, a distinction so fascinating that he translated the single subject into both steel and aluminum, just as he often did with other subjects, and also produced compositional variations in both color and black-and-white" (S. Hunter, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1994, pp. 35-36).