Tom Wesselmann

Danièle Thompson, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1972)
Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Wesselmann, November - December 1972, cat. no. 8, illustrated

Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 66, illustrated and p. 189, illustrated in color

This painting is in very good condition. There is some wear to the tips of the shaped canvas and paint loss along the lower left edge, located 2-2 ¼ in, 3 ¼ - 4 ¼ in. and 16-16 ¼ inches up from the bottom left corner. There are faint handling marks toward the far right top corner and two pale whitish accretions in the flesh located 13 ¾ - 14 ½ in. down from this corner and 2 ½ - 3 ¼ in. from the right side. A network of scattered hairline drying cracks, which appear stable, is located in the dark blue of the flower vase. There is a faint grayish arced scuff located in the center of the forehead, 34 ½ - 40 inches from the left edge and 18 ¾ - 22 ½ in. from the bottom edge. A ½ in. brown aqueous accretion is located in the forehead, 28 3/8 in. from the left and 18-18 ½ in. from the bottom. Under UV light, there is linear retouching at the pull margin along the length of the right side edge and extending somewhat into the face of the painting at the lower right corner with an attendant 1 in. retouch located 9-10 inches to the left. There is also a small retouch in the forehead, located 8 1/8-8 ½ in. from the bottom and 41-41 ½ in. from the left. There are also long vertical aqueous drips not visible to the naked eye located in the flesh (9-9 ½ in. from the right) and in the green pillow (11-13 ¼ in. from the right edge).The shaped canvas is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Tom Wesselmann's Bedroom Painting #27, 1970-72 combines two of the most important subjects developed by Wesselmann in the 1960s: the nude and the still-life composition. Wesselmann's Great American Nude series began in 1961 and was the genesis of the artist's success within the burgeoning Pop Art explosion which celebrated vernacular motifs elevated to the realm of Fine Art. Wesselmann's visual vocabulary soon moved on to include another traditional genre from the art historical past: the seemingly straightforward still-life compositions. In Bedroom Painting #27, Wesselmann focused on the composition with an editorial precision born from his early training as a cartoonist in the 1950s. The layout was expertly cropped and, typical of his Bedroom Paintings, Wesselmann focused on one main portion of the female body as the basis for the composition. Of the development of his Bedroom Paintings, Wesselmann has said, "I'd gotten over the years excited about scale, coming closer on the nude. I'd gotten a little tired of doing full-length nudes because everything else in the painting had to be so small. It wasn't exciting enough to my eye." (Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral History interview with Tom Wesselmann, 1984).

In its monumentality of subject, Bedroom Painting #27 is also intimately associted with the Smoker series of the early 1970s which celebrated on a grand scale the evocative close-up of female lips and fingers in the act of smoking a cigarette.  The model and former owner of Bedroom Painting #27 was Danièle Thompson from Paris who frequently posed for Wesselmann at this time. She was the subject of four Bedroom Paintings and several Smoker paintings, since Wesselmann admired her long and elegant fingers. Bedroom Painting #27 was commissioned by her husband, Richard Thompson, and her likeness appears both as the reclining nude and the photograph portrait in the bedside still-life.

Bedroom Painting #27 strikes at the heart of Wesselmann's figurative engagement. Trained in the manner of the Abstract Expressionists, Wesselmann began to paint figuratively as a way to move beyond the drips and gestures that dominated the New York art world of the late 1950s. In order to make this leap, Wesselmann turned to the powerful subject matter of the nude already familiar to painting's history. In Bedroom Painting #27, the jewel tone colors and color block arrangement of forms recall the work of Matisse, as in Algerian Woman, 1909. Both women are depicted in a way that highlights their sensuality, while also being rendered as decorative objects and compositional elements. They are equally at home in the bedroom or as part of the ornamental tableau. In Wesselmann's words, "I was always looking at Matisse, but he had done all those exaggerations of the figure in his compositional inventions, and I decided to play it as straight as I could, with no tricks... I still had to make something important happen. I wasn't quite sure how to do that, but I decided to make the imagery as intense as possible." (Sam Hunter, Tom Wesselmann, 1996, p. 18).

In the catalogue for the Wesselmann exhibition that toured eleven major European museums in the mid-1990s, Marco Livingstone describes Wesselmann's paintings as, "evidence of states of heightened pleasure, such as we experience when looking at or touching the face or body of a person we find attractive, or when eating, drinking, smelling the fragrance of flowers, listening to music or lolling on the beach in the hot sun." (Exh. Cat., Tübingen, Institut für Kulturaustausch, Tom Wesselmann, 1994, p. 9).  The elements of Bedroom Painting #27 cohere to suggest this same atmospheric rapture, which is a hallmark of Wesselmann's iconic oeuvre.

Bedroom Painting #27 incorporates the display of objects familiar to still-life paintings and also infuses the picture with all the sensuality of an intense sensory experience. Wesselmann's composition features the main subject of the female nude front and center, vulnerable and exposed in the intimate setting of the bedroom. But the inverted nude does not engage the viewer directly; it is the image of portraiture found amongst the objects of the still life tableau that locks eyes with the viewer. With lowered eyelids, Wesselmann's nude is lost to her internal universe, while the reciprocal, mirror-image female reflection anchors the subject matter and recalls the odalisques of Painting's past.  The composition's strength is reinforced by the repetition of pairs of rounded shapes. The female portrait's eyes, the blissful half moons of the nude's own lids, the green pillow and the twin roses that crown the composition all imply the supple curvature of the nude's breasts, only one of which is exposed in the painting. Here, the conveyance of sight and touch meld, complimenting the intoxicating suggestions of scent as embodied by the roses, the perfume bottle and the nude herself.

In many ways, Wesselmann's closest Pop Art affiliation can be found in the art of fellow painter Roy Lichtenstein. The women of Lichtenstein and Wesselmann are seemingly akin to one another. As beautiful, graphic representations of the influence of mass media in society, they are visually arresting. These women no longer control their own images or emotions, as their private moments and emotions are made public and thus dominated by the gaze of the viewer as consumer. Lichtenstein used the conventions of comic strip construction to subtly and simultaneously tease and celebrate the feminine constructs presented in the media, but Wesselmann's nudes remain defined by their physicality and by the objects that surround them. Like the American family who is understood by the contents of their home, Wesselmann's nude is understood through the contents of her bedside table. And yet these items remain impersonal and anonymous: they represent a feminine type, an idyllic creation afloat in the American cultural landscape, and an embodiment of Pop Art's power of suggestion.