.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Serving as a cornerstone of Wesselmann’s career, The Great American Nude series positions the artist firmly within the lineage of painters who have wrestled with one of Western art’s oldest subjects. In Great American Nude #41 a female figure reposes upon a deep blue couch, her salmon-pink body cutting decisively across the horizontal of an oval canvas. The composition splits the visual plane between a domestic interior and collaged outer world. With only few clean contour lines to define her form, the figure attains a distinct planer quality. Beneath her, the calmness of domesticity lingers – restrained compared to denser examples of the artist’s earlier Great American Nudes. The alluring blue of the couch ripples against the curves of her body atop a linoleum wooden flooring, grounding her in a distinctly postwar interior world.
As critic Jill Johnson observed in 1963, “Tom Wesselmann's complex compositions (collage-assemblages) are beautiful examples of the convergence of several modern preoccupations in a new pictorial scheme of another personal nature” (J. Johnston, "The Artist in a Coca-Cola World," Village Voice, January 31, 1963, p. 24.) Great American Nude #41 epitomizes this duality: the nude’s modernity emerges not from its form, but instead the charged cultural imagery surrounding it. Above her, an enlarged American flag serves as wallpaper, with stars so pronounced as if to symbolically zoom into the context of America. A still life perches just above her breasts, and beyond that, a window opens onto a wintry European town rendered in a post-Impressionist style. These layered vignettes bridge art-historical memory with mid-century Americana, creating a painterly collage where sensuality, nationalism, and mass culture coexist.
As Princeton art historian Sam Hunter notes “[Wesselmann] will undoubtedly always be remembered for associating his erotic themes with the color of the American flag” (Hunter, Sam. “Remembering Tom Wesselmann And His Alter Ego, Slim Stealingworth.” American Art, vol. 19, no. 2, 2005, pp. 108–11.) The early 1960s marked one of the most provocative decades in America—postwar prosperity had birthed a booming consumer culture, where the nuclear family and the Playboy fantasy were sold with equal conviction. With the recent definition of obscenity in legal code, Wesselmann’s flag takes on more symbolic meaning. Observed by the American flag, Great American Nude #41 asserts its right to exist protected under the First Amendment. Playboy turned $500 photos of Marilyn Monroe into millions, effectively merging the idealization of the female body with the idealization of America itself. In Wesselmann’s vision, the Great American Nude participates in that mythology, updating the reclining female form for a pop age—her body molded not by drapery or myth, but by the glossy, commodified surfaces that defined her cultural environment. “I wasn’t making social commentary,” Wesselmann later reflected. “I was making aesthetic excitement” (T. Wesselmann, interview by David Whitney, Artforum, vol. 18, no. 9, May 1980, p. 60).
Conceived in the midst of his sellout debut show at the Green Gallery in New York, Great American Nude #41 captures Wesselmann at the peak of this series. The works of this period were met with near-instant acclaim; that same year, three of his paintings entered major institutional collections, cementing his position as a leading figure of the Pop generation. Bold, provocative, and unflinchingly American, Great American Nude #41 stands as one of Wesselmann’s defining achievements—a declaration that the most enduring subject of art history could be reborn amidst the trappings of modern desire.
As critic Jill Johnson observed in 1963, “Tom Wesselmann's complex compositions (collage-assemblages) are beautiful examples of the convergence of several modern preoccupations in a new pictorial scheme of another personal nature” (J. Johnston, "The Artist in a Coca-Cola World," Village Voice, January 31, 1963, p. 24.) Great American Nude #41 epitomizes this duality: the nude’s modernity emerges not from its form, but instead the charged cultural imagery surrounding it. Above her, an enlarged American flag serves as wallpaper, with stars so pronounced as if to symbolically zoom into the context of America. A still life perches just above her breasts, and beyond that, a window opens onto a wintry European town rendered in a post-Impressionist style. These layered vignettes bridge art-historical memory with mid-century Americana, creating a painterly collage where sensuality, nationalism, and mass culture coexist.
As Princeton art historian Sam Hunter notes “[Wesselmann] will undoubtedly always be remembered for associating his erotic themes with the color of the American flag” (Hunter, Sam. “Remembering Tom Wesselmann And His Alter Ego, Slim Stealingworth.” American Art, vol. 19, no. 2, 2005, pp. 108–11.) The early 1960s marked one of the most provocative decades in America—postwar prosperity had birthed a booming consumer culture, where the nuclear family and the Playboy fantasy were sold with equal conviction. With the recent definition of obscenity in legal code, Wesselmann’s flag takes on more symbolic meaning. Observed by the American flag, Great American Nude #41 asserts its right to exist protected under the First Amendment. Playboy turned $500 photos of Marilyn Monroe into millions, effectively merging the idealization of the female body with the idealization of America itself. In Wesselmann’s vision, the Great American Nude participates in that mythology, updating the reclining female form for a pop age—her body molded not by drapery or myth, but by the glossy, commodified surfaces that defined her cultural environment. “I wasn’t making social commentary,” Wesselmann later reflected. “I was making aesthetic excitement” (T. Wesselmann, interview by David Whitney, Artforum, vol. 18, no. 9, May 1980, p. 60).
Conceived in the midst of his sellout debut show at the Green Gallery in New York, Great American Nude #41 captures Wesselmann at the peak of this series. The works of this period were met with near-instant acclaim; that same year, three of his paintings entered major institutional collections, cementing his position as a leading figure of the Pop generation. Bold, provocative, and unflinchingly American, Great American Nude #41 stands as one of Wesselmann’s defining achievements—a declaration that the most enduring subject of art history could be reborn amidst the trappings of modern desire.