Bedroom Painting #15

This oil on canvas painting is irregulary-shaped and combines still-life objects with a woman's foot with painted toenails. The foot lines the bottom edge of the canvas, the ball of the foot resting on a round, yellow pillow. An orange, a rose, a portrait of a lover (self-portrait of Wesselmann) is in the background. The contour of the canvas is shaped to fit the objects depicted.		Tom Wesselmann
American (1931-2004)
Bedroom Painting #15, 1968-70
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Modern Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 250
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Dimensions:  H: 84 1/4 in, W: 119 1/4 in
Object ID: 77.420

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Tom Wesselmann
Cincinnati, Ohio 1931-2004 New York, N.Y.
Bedroom Painting #15, 1968-70
Oil on canvas, 84 1/4 × 119 1/4 in. (214 × 302.9 cm)
Signed and dated upper left: Wesselmann 70
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 77.420
Reproduction © Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.
References: Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, pp. 58, 65; Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Twentieth-Century American Painting, London, 1987, pp. 344-47; Brenda Schmahmann, "Tom Wesselmann's post-collage works: 'Acting in the gap between art and life,'" South African Journal of Cultural and Art History3 (July 1989), pp. 270-71.

Among the most irreverent and playful of post-World War II aesthetics, Pop art came to the fore in England and America in the late 1950s and over the next decade gained acceptance as a major style. Reacting to the abstract and subjective pictorial language of the Abstract Expressionists (see object 83.592), America's Pop artists embraced figuration and devised a readily accessible vocabulary of forms drawn from popular culture. Like James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol (see objects 71.699, 71.676, 81.39), Tom Wesselmann made liberal use of the "throw-away" imagery of urban mass culture-as encountered in newspapers, comics, magazines, movies, and television-and often did so to comment ironically on the nature of the erotic impulse in contemporary American life.
Wesselmann showed no inclination toward art until he joined the Army and began to try his hand at cartooning. Thereafter he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati was his hometown) and at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he encountered, and ultimately rejected, Abstract Expressionism.
His first significant works were small collages in a Cubist vein that juxtaposed his own drawings of female nudes with magazine clippings of soda bottles, food, and other commercial products. With time he abandoned these tiny assemblages for large paintings, though he maintained the bright, slick colors and hard-edge realism of the magazine ads. In 1962 he embarked on his series of Great American Nudes. These brashly colored, monumental canvases feature highly suggestive female nudes in bath or bedroom settings and often incorporated actual objects -telephones, radios, tables, and chairs-in an effort to create a more palpable domestic environment.
In 1967 Wesselmann began another series of large-scale canvases, the Bedroom Paintings, in which he pursued his fascination with erotic themes. These highly compressed images combined still-life objects appropriate to the bedroom and redolent of "pop" romance-pillows, lighted cigarettes, roses, oranges, a lover's photograph-with erotically charged parts of the male or female anatomy.
As in the Chrysler's Bedroom Painting #15 of 1968-70, the contours of these canvases are often shaped to fit the objects depicted, and thus echo the imagery's sensuously undulating forms. Wesselmann himself noted that in Bedroom Painting #15he "gave the main role to a huge yellow pillow, and set up a dramatic scale change in the painting, between the pillow and the other elements." The gigantic foot with glossily painted nails serves as a tantalizing reference to an unseen female nude reclining on a bed, and as such it frustrates the viewer's desire to play the voyeur. In fact, Wesselmann reserves this role for himself: it is he who gazes from the photograph at bedside and who alone can "see" all from this privileged vantage point.
The Chrysler also possesses two of Wesselmann's preliminary drawings for Bedroom Painting #15, both executed in pencil on paper (see objects 87.508, 87.507).
JCH
 

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