Lauren Mahony is an art historian based in New York. She worked as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, before joining Gagosian, where she has worked on exhibitions and publications devoted to Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, David Reed, and others. Photo: Sarah Kisner
The late 1960s were a particularly fruitful and inventive period for the American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann. Perhaps best known for his Great American Nudes series and his still lifes, in this period he shifted his focus to several new bodies of work that pushed these genres in new directions. The Dropouts used the negative space of shaped canvases to suggest the human form, while the Bedroom Paintings expanded the internal scale of the earlier nudes. He also began to use an opaque projector to enlarge his drawings and studies, allowing him to make works on an even grander scale. A critical series that evolved from these developments is the so-called “standing cutout pieces,” or standing still lifes, which he began in 1967; the first works of this type, Still Life #56 and Still Life #57, would be completed over the next few years, with Still Life #59 following soon after. These comprise a number of shaped canvases depicting individual still life elements, some freestanding, some hung on the wall; the group as a whole is designed to be precisely installed to complete a still life composition at dramatically larger-than-life scale, dwarfing the viewer. Although these installations are three-dimensional, the way the elements combine to create a frontal pictorial image was exceedingly important to the artist, and drawings and scaled maquettes helped him to achieve the right proportions. Of Still Life #57, for example, he would recall that the decision to crop the radio on the left side, which took him a year, was important “to help keep the work in a flat painting concept.” At the same time, it also “helped the work stay off balance, so it was less apt to relax into a theater set.”1 The contradictions between flatness and dimensionality, intimacy and monumentality, and the tensions they created were of great interest to Wesselmann. One critic referred to this type of work as “an expansion of collage,” noting its formal connections to Cubist works in that medium, and to Synthetic Cubist painting.2
On completing Still Life #57, Wesselmann donated the work to the Museum of Modern Art, where it was exhibited early in 1971.3 By the summer, which he spent at his lake house in upstate New York, he was busy conceptualizing the next work in the series, the first to be exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery, where he had shown since 1966. During this period Wesselmann began the practice of spending his summers in the country making drawings and studies for the larger works that he would execute later in his New York studio. In early August he wrote to Carroll Janis, Sidney Janis’s son, to inquire about the wall lengths in the new gallery space, since they had relocated the previous summer from 15 East 57th Street to 6 West 57th Street. His inquiry was probably made to help him plan his next monumental work, Still Life #59—to think about how it would work in the gallery space and how large it could indeed be.4 The first maquette for the work, made in 1971, includes all of the elements in the final composition, sketchily painted on cardboard, with the addition of a scaled viewer in a gray suit.
Wesselmann described Still Life #59 as “large, complex, and powerfully compressed.”5 Measuring nearly nine feet tall, sixteen feet wide, and seven feet deep, it includes several of the domestic objects typical in Wesselmann’s compositions: a telephone, a tipped-over bottle of red nail polish, an ashtray with crumpled tissues, a vase of roses, and a framed photograph of a woman, all set against blue blinds covering a window, itself a return to the artist’s earliest collages. These objects, though common and familiar, were also specific to the artist’s daily life and interests. The telephone—cropped at the left edge of the canvas, just as the radio is in Still Life #57—is in fact the artist’s own phone; the source photograph, a close-up view, shows more of the phone than we see in the painting, including the phone number of Wesselmann’s studio. The photograph also shows a bottle of nail polish, oriented in relation to the telephone as it is in the final still life, but clear rather than red, as it is in the painting. The picture is an indicator of the artist’s process of using photography to inform his painting practice.
Perhaps the most striking element in Still Life #59 is the framed portrait at the far right, which shows the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Wesselmann noted that “it was the first time he tried to paint a specific portrait, other than his wife’s or his own; and he was highly excited to paint her large likeness into this kind of painting.”6 The portrait is based on a photograph of Moore that appeared on the cover of Family Circle magazine in August 1971, which Wesselmann could have seen during his summer upstate. The decision to use Moore’s likeness, at a moment when she would have been highly recognizable—her eponymous television show had premiered the previous fall—was surely intentional. Not only did Wesselmann admit to having a “crush” on Moore, he probably thought that her familiarity would make the work more inviting.7
Still Life #59 made its debut at the Sidney Janis Gallery in November 1972 (below), where it was shown alongside related works from the Bedroom Paintings series. Bedroom Painting #28 includes a similar array of objects, here framed by the outline of a woman’s breast and torso, suggested primarily in the negative space of the shaped canvas. Painted at many times their actual size, the objects in Still Life #59 overwhelm the viewer, a device that calls to mind what Willem de Kooning, one of Wesselmann’s early heroes, described as “intimate proportions,” or, “the feeling of familiarity you have when you look at somebody’s big toe when close to it, or at a crease in a hand or a nose or lips or a necktie.”8 Even without the close-up nude that provides the context for the bedroom environment in Bedroom Painting #28, the enormous scale of the still life inserts the viewer into the intimate scene.
Over the next decade, Wesselmann would continue to work on the series of standing still lifes, producing a new one every few years and eventually adding sculptural elements to the shaped canvases. At each of his solo shows at Janis between 1972 and 1982, a new work from the series was presented for the first time, complementing his other recent paintings. This winter at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery, nine of these monumental artworks will be exhibited together for the first time, along with related source materials, drawings, and maquettes, marking a rare opportunity to explore this unique body of work.
1Slim Stealingworth (a pseudonym for Tom Wesselmann), Tom Wesselmann (New York: Abbeville Press, 1980), p. 61.
2Carter Ratcliff, “Reviews: Tom Wesselmann,” Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 83.
3Recent American Acquisitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 12–March 11, 1971.
4Although Wesselmann’s letter has not been located, his questions can be inferred from Carroll Janis’s response. Carroll Janis, letter to Wesselmann, September 9, 1971, Archives of the Estate of Tom Wesselmann.
5Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, p. 65.
6Ibid.
7Ibid.
8Willem de Kooning, quoted in Thomas B. Hess, “De Kooning Paints a Picture,” Artnews 52, no. 1 (March 1953): 32.
Artwork © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photos courtesy The Estate of Tom Wesselmann unless otherwise noted