.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Painting, sex, and humour are the most important things in my life’ (Tom Wesselmann)
A technical marvel that appears effortless, Tom Wesselmann’s Blonde Vivienne (3-D) (1988) is a sterling example of the artist’s innovative Steel Drawings series. Held in the same private collection since 1996, it is a roundel-shaped construction of brightly painted, laser-cut pieces of aluminium. It depicts the head and upper torso of a blonde woman, her face a void beyond her crimson lips. She is reclining on a bed in front of a window, through which can be glimpsed a green rolling landscape. Curtains, a cushion and a red tulip are partially visible, but cut off by the grey border. These various elements, rendered in strikingly vivid colours, are overlaid over each other to sculptural effect. The woman’s blonde hair hovers over the frame, granting the work a three-dimensional presence. Wesselmann plays with our ability to perceive depth in negative space. The shadows of each component enhance the artwork’s visual impact, in particular adding definition to the right side of the subject’s face.
Wesselmann was a leading light of the 1960s American Pop art movement. From 1961 he won acclaim for the Great American Nude series, which began with a nude portrayed only using the American flag colours of red, white and blue as well as those with patriotic associations such as gold. This series quickly expanded to encompass numerous paintings and collages, often featuring cut-outs from billboards and posters depicting famous artworks, objets d’art and mass-manufactured products. From 1967 Wesselmann broke out beyond the traditional four-sided canvas with the Smokers, cut-out paintings depicting lips, cigarettes and hands: art for a liberated era of American commercialism. The easy pleasure of his art recalled French modernist Henri Matisse, famed for his mastery of colour and line.
In 1983, Wesselmann retreated to his studio and began to concoct the metal works that would animate his later career. Inspired by Matisse’s late gouache cut-outs, Wesselmann first worked by hand before developing his own laser-cutting technology in November 1984. As he later wrote as his alter ego Slim Stealingworth, ‘Wesselmann’s original idea, that began the cut-out works, was to preserve the process and immediacy of his drawings from life, complete with the false lines and errors, and realise them in steel. It was as though the lines had just been miraculously drawn in Steel’ (S. Stealingworth quoted in M. Livingstone, ‘Tom Wesselmann: Man of Steel’, in Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal 2021, p. 43). The resulting works played with the boundaries of representation and reality. As Wesselmann told art historian Sam Hunter, ‘When the same steel drawing was done in colour, it became a nude more than a drawing. The subject matter, that is, became the more dominant element’ (T. Wesselmann quoted in B. Goretti and B. Kelly, ‘Chronology’, in ibid., p. 184). Vividly enacting this process, Blonde Vivienne (3-D) is a scintillating instance of Wesselmann’s trailblazing, eye-catching practice.
A technical marvel that appears effortless, Tom Wesselmann’s Blonde Vivienne (3-D) (1988) is a sterling example of the artist’s innovative Steel Drawings series. Held in the same private collection since 1996, it is a roundel-shaped construction of brightly painted, laser-cut pieces of aluminium. It depicts the head and upper torso of a blonde woman, her face a void beyond her crimson lips. She is reclining on a bed in front of a window, through which can be glimpsed a green rolling landscape. Curtains, a cushion and a red tulip are partially visible, but cut off by the grey border. These various elements, rendered in strikingly vivid colours, are overlaid over each other to sculptural effect. The woman’s blonde hair hovers over the frame, granting the work a three-dimensional presence. Wesselmann plays with our ability to perceive depth in negative space. The shadows of each component enhance the artwork’s visual impact, in particular adding definition to the right side of the subject’s face.
Wesselmann was a leading light of the 1960s American Pop art movement. From 1961 he won acclaim for the Great American Nude series, which began with a nude portrayed only using the American flag colours of red, white and blue as well as those with patriotic associations such as gold. This series quickly expanded to encompass numerous paintings and collages, often featuring cut-outs from billboards and posters depicting famous artworks, objets d’art and mass-manufactured products. From 1967 Wesselmann broke out beyond the traditional four-sided canvas with the Smokers, cut-out paintings depicting lips, cigarettes and hands: art for a liberated era of American commercialism. The easy pleasure of his art recalled French modernist Henri Matisse, famed for his mastery of colour and line.
In 1983, Wesselmann retreated to his studio and began to concoct the metal works that would animate his later career. Inspired by Matisse’s late gouache cut-outs, Wesselmann first worked by hand before developing his own laser-cutting technology in November 1984. As he later wrote as his alter ego Slim Stealingworth, ‘Wesselmann’s original idea, that began the cut-out works, was to preserve the process and immediacy of his drawings from life, complete with the false lines and errors, and realise them in steel. It was as though the lines had just been miraculously drawn in Steel’ (S. Stealingworth quoted in M. Livingstone, ‘Tom Wesselmann: Man of Steel’, in Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal 2021, p. 43). The resulting works played with the boundaries of representation and reality. As Wesselmann told art historian Sam Hunter, ‘When the same steel drawing was done in colour, it became a nude more than a drawing. The subject matter, that is, became the more dominant element’ (T. Wesselmann quoted in B. Goretti and B. Kelly, ‘Chronology’, in ibid., p. 184). Vividly enacting this process, Blonde Vivienne (3-D) is a scintillating instance of Wesselmann’s trailblazing, eye-catching practice.