Still Life #1

In the early 1960s Tom Wesselmann set himself the challenge to paint the Great American still life and Still Life #1 is one of the most outstanding fulfillments of this ambition. Wesselmann has mixed conventional oil painting with collage elements to resuscitate what many contemporary artists then considered a dead and irrelevant convention, especially amidst a climate that championed Abstract Expressionism and scorned figuration. Wesselmann created a new type of genre painting for a modern-day America: one that celebrates with unashamed idealism and patriotism the shining consumer lifestyle that was the product of the American dream. In the words of the author Thomas H. Garver "From this stock of images Wesselmann made certain basic selections, then working almost as director or choreographer, arranged and rearranged them across the canvas, relying on his sense of composition and density which called for increasingly subtle shifts of objects until the entire work was "locked up" to the point where further changes would destroy the structure. His paintings are precise compositions, anonymous in the materials, yet highly sophisticated in their construction. These paintings, like those of Mondrian, may have been static, but the stasis was the result of a balancing of tensions between competing compositional forces." (T.H. Garver, introduction to Tom Wesselmann: Early Still Lifes: 1962-1964, exh. cat., Balboa 1971.)