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Gagosian Quarterly

Summer 2023 Issue

“Tight and small and Figurative”:Tom Wesselmann’s early Collages

Susan Davidson, editor of the forthcoming monograph on the Great American Nudes, a series of works by Tom Wesselmann, explores the artist’s early experiments with collage, tracing their development from humble beginnings to the iconic series of paintings.

Tom Wesselmann in his first studio/apartment at 175 Bleecker Street, New York, in 1960 with a selection of early collage works; clockwise from upper left: Landscape (n.d.), The Lousy Haircut (1959), Little Bathtub Collage #6 (1960, destroyed), and Portrait Collage #9 (1959). Photo: Jerry Goodman

Tom Wesselmann in his first studio/apartment at 175 Bleecker Street, New York, in 1960 with a selection of early collage works; clockwise from upper left: Landscape (n.d.), The Lousy Haircut (1959), Little Bathtub Collage #6 (1960, destroyed), and Portrait Collage #9 (1959). Photo: Jerry Goodman

Susan Davidson

Curator and art historian Susan Davidson is an authority in the fields of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art with a specialty in the art of Robert Rauschenberg. Davidson is also an accomplished museum professional with over thirty-year’s experience at two distinguished institutions: The Menil Collection, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Tom Wesselmann’s college experience was interrupted when he was conscripted into the army in 1952. Bored, he occupied his time by drawing cartoons that poked fun at army life. Eighteen months later, when the Korean War ended, he resumed his education at the University of Cincinnati on the GI Bill and enrolled in evening classes at the city’s Art Academy with the intention of becoming a cartoonist. His confidence in this career path soared when he sold a number of cartoons to national magazines, convincing him he was “set for life.”1 In the fall of 1956, without much purpose other than conquering the cartoon market, Wesselmann followed a teacher’s recommendation to enroll in Cooper Union in New York’s East Village. The school’s curriculum focused on the fundamentals of design and drawing in the first year and introduced the essentials of painting in the second. Until then, Wesselmann had never applied paint to canvas and he found himself dispirited by his first endeavors: “When I started painting . . . I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no point of view.”2

The heyday of Abstract Expressionism over the previous decade was waning when Wesselmann arrived in New York. Large-scale, fully abstract canvases by the likes of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock were giving way to such works as Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, which fashioned an entire galaxy of commonplace imagery, blurring the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Nonetheless, Wesselmann immersed himself in studying de Kooning’s technique in works on view in the city’s museums—Easter Monday (1955–56), for example, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3

Wesselmann underwent several personal upheavals during his second year at Cooper Union. His marriage was disintegrating and he began to question the Midwestern religious values he had been raised with. Progressive modes of thinking found in contemporary literature by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco helped to relieve the profound crisis he was weathering, the consequence being that he quit cartooning in favor of fine art. Wesselmann also reckoned with the realization that he could not achieve the level of de Kooning’s art or even come close to matching it. He accordingly applied the lessons of the older artist’s work in, initially, an abstract collage format rather than in painting.

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, Riding Through Connecticut, 1958, newspaper, paint, pastel, fabric, and cardboard with paper, wood, metal, foil, sticker, and painted wooden rod on board, 40 ¼ × 46 inches (102.2 × 116.8 cm)

As Wesselmann’s work developed over the next two years, his facility as a painter never truly advanced. This may be why he found collage an easier medium. Indeed, his first large collages were his last attempts at mimicking Abstract Expressionism by stapling and gluing torn and found papers with the verve with which de Kooning applied paint to canvas. Riding through Connecticut (1958), interestingly, is more closely aligned to Rauschenberg’s early-1950s work in its use and reveal of newspaper, comics, fabric, and found objects.5 De Kooning’s “line, color, and mass” are more in evidence in Green Camp Landscape (1959), which hints at the still life genre and Pop art sensibility that would dominate Wesselmann’s oeuvre in the 1960s.6 The triangular shape at the collage’s center resembles a cone; the three round collaged elements on top suggest scoops of ice cream. This association is reinforced by the inclusion of a crushed Baskin & Robbins ice cream cup forming the left “scoop.”

By the middle of 1959, though Wesselmann was still working in collage, his subject matter and the scale of his work took a 180-degree turn, from abstraction to figuration and from large to small. “Since I was turning my back on [abstraction], I decided I had to be tight and small and figurative, all the things I’d scorned.” He took “solace in the feeling that I couldn’t be with them or like them, but I could be myself.”7 This attitude adjustment meant that Wesselmann for the first time assumed full ownership of his artistic pursuits: “So I began to treasure being myself. . . . there’s nobody I knew that was painting like me or working like this.”8

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Hans Memling, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1472–75, oil on oak panel, 15 ¾ × 11 ⅜ inches (40 × 29 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

Wesselmann resolved that his “subject matter was going to be the history of art.”9 A reproduction of Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1472–75), purchased in the Metropolitan’s museum shop, offered the way forward. The painting depicts a wistful Italian gentleman in whose soulful eyes Wesselmann identified his own loneliness, having recently divorced his wife and living alone for the first time. The Northern Renaissance iconography of a figure seated before a window with a distant view to a landscape beyond, coupled with the panel’s intimate scale, provided inspiration for his first group of small collages. In a humorous nod, he ironically titled the series Portrait Collages (1959–61), although no identifiable individuals are depicted. To reinforce the works’ anonymity, each was titled with a number following the series’ generic title.10 This practice, which would become the artist’s methodology for titling his serial artwork until the 1980s, follows the numbering convention used by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Pollock as a means of neutralizing any sense of the artwork’s content.11 The artist suggested that the small scale of his early collages was determined by the confines of his studio, an eight-by-ten-foot room on the ground floor at 175 Bleecker Street, between MacDougal and Sullivan streets, where he lived and worked from the summer after his graduation from Cooper Union, in 1959, until January 1963. This studio would be the cauldron for Wesselmann’s full-fledged arrival as an artist as he feverishly worked to develop his style.

Beginning in the summer of 1959, Wesselmann produced twenty-nine homogeneous Portrait Collages. He set a determined program, collapsing the picture plane by establishing a shallow space for each composition, whose collage elements were tightly arranged. The series almost exclusively depicts imaginary women with either brunette or blonde hair, seated bust length in profile in an elaborate patterned interior.12 The Portrait Collages establish the artist’s fascination with domestic interiority and reflect a connection to the subject matter of French painters such as Édouard Vuillard. All but four are horizontal.13 Upon completion, the artist often framed these intimate collages in simple wooden strip frames, a standard convention of the day.

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #1, 1959, paper, printed paper, and printed reproductions with pencil, pastel, unidentified green pigment, and leaf on board, 9 ⅝ × 10 ⅞ inches (24.2 × 27.7 cm)

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #15, 1959, mixed media and collage on board, 11 ⅝ × 12 ⅛ inches (29.5 × 30.8 cm)

Working as an urban flaneur, Wesselmann combed the streets, finding treasures where others only saw trash. “I always started them with a piece of found wood. I didn’t like to work on just anything. . . . I’d find it having a nature all its own.”14 Unencumbered by the collage material, the exposed wood in Portrait Collage #1 (1959), for example, becomes a woman’s dress, or in Portrait Collage #15 (1959), her arms. Wesselmann augmented the found wood with postcards, cuttings from wallpaper pattern books, stickers, fabrics (whether velvet, checkered, or striped), cigarette packs, religious cards, dollhouse parts (such as miniature rugs), packaging from his favorite Brooklyn bakery (doilies, chocolate or cupcake wrappers, box-lining paper), and even organic material (the leaf of greens from a Trader Vic’s soup in Portrait Collage #1 giving way to leaves fallen from trees in later collages). The Joseph Cornell–type inventory he assembled, though more commonplace and less erudite, provided ready components for his gluing pleasure. The small format necessitated precise hand work for cutting and applying the materials; rarely are traces of glue visible.

Wesselmann’s sense of humor emerges from these deadpan caricatures despite their somber disposition and gravitas, which differentiates them from the exuberance of Wesselmann’s later Pop works. The sitters are awkward in demeanor, evoking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American limner painting. Whether Wesselmann was aware of these untrained itinerant artists, who sought portrait commissions from a rising mercantile class, is unknown, but connections are apparent. Similarities between Wesselmann’s anonymous portraits and the limners can be drawn in the poses of the figures, their dress and attributes, the interior settings, and especially the naïve flatness of their rendering.

The vignettes of daily life in the series draw on Wesselmann’s engagement with cartooning. As a whole, the series suggests a comic strip format.15 The tension generated between highbrow and lowbrow would become a chief characteristic of Wesselmann’s art. Mostly, the “Americanness” of the series, in its materials and kitchen-sink settings, anticipates the concept of the Great American Nudes, which Wesselmann would begin in 1961. Yet these collages are decidedly neither modern nor avant-garde in either term’s meaning at the time. When Wesselmann declared he had to “scorn” de Kooning, he really meant it.16

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, 14th Street Nude #1, 1960, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, and printed paper with pencil, paint, and pastel on board, 4 ½ × 5 ¼ inches (11.5 × 13.1 cm)

In the fall of 1959, Wesselmann introduced into his collage repertoire another art-historical subject: the nude, a theme he would later take up in his Great American Nude series. His interest in the topic arose from live-model sketch classes that he attended at the Village Art Center in Greenwich Village after graduating from Cooper Union, and from his delight in the relationship he had begun with Claire Selley, who would become his second wife in November 1963. Wesselmann worked on this group of collages concurrently with the Portrait Collages, producing twenty-eight examples. His engagement with it was based more on his interest in the art-historical motif and less on the physicality of the subject. The nude would become a dominant element of his practice, occupying him throughout his career.

Departing from the anonymity of Portrait Collages, Wesselmann based the Small Nudes on specific models: Selley, their friend Judy Tersch (later Teichberg), and an unnamed woman with a “very voluptuous body.”17 The works’ small scale and horizontal format follows that of the Portrait Collages, though again with occasional vertical and one tondo example.18 The Small Nudes are given descriptive titles—one of Wesselmann’s few series of the 1960s that does not follow his numerical titling convention.

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, San Francisco Nude with Green Wall, 1959, pastel, fabric, painted paper with printed reproduction, unidentified black pigment, and dried flowers on board, 6 ⅝ × 9 ¾ inches (16.6 × 24.5 cm)

Each woman in the Small Nudes assumes one of four positions: lounging, resting, or sprawling on her back, with knees bent, as in Nude with Parrot #1 (Purple Wall) and Nude in Brown and White Striped Bed (both 1960); reclining on her side with legs closed, as in San Francisco Nude with Green Wallpaper (1959); lying on her stomach with one leg bent and the other extended, as in 14th Street Nude #1 and Red Wall and Blanket Nude (both 1960); and seated in a chair with knees drawn up, as in San Francisco Nude with Yellow Wall (1959–60). A few nudes assume distinctly erotic poses with splayed legs, as in 14th Street Nude #2 and Nude with Leg Up on Cushion, Purple Wall (both 1960). Sexual explicitness would become a characteristic feature of the Great American Nudes by 1964; at this early stage, however, Wesselmann treats the nudes modestly.

Still life elements such as fruits, bottles of alcohol, and vases of flowers are more pronounced in the Portrait Collages than in the Small Nudes. This may be attributed to the fact that the nude’s dominance of the picture plane left less room for the elaborate background patterning of the Portrait Collages. Moreover, Wesselmann’s focus with the Small Nudes was the subject itself, whereas the Portrait Collages may be considered part of the artist’s attempt to master perspective. As Wesselmann’s Pop work developed, especially in the Great American Nudes and in the Still Life paintings he began in 1962, arrangements of seemingly bizarre or out-of-place cut-and-pasted common objects gained importance.

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, Nude with Leg Up on Cushion, Purple Wall, 1960, paper, printed paper, printed reproduction, and fabric with paint, pastel, pencil, and unidentified rust-colored pigment on board, 6 ⅜ × 10 ⅜ inches (16.4 × 26.4 cm)

The first glimmerings of what would soon become Wesselmann’s signature pictorial space, with an interplay of flattened planes and squashed perspectives, appear in these early collages. Ironically, his use of the view-through-a-window motif was intended to provide perspective in an interior setting. In many ways, it was a brilliant solution that masked his artistic insecurities at the time. His fiddling with perspective in these works also produced illusionistic confusion for the viewer; one cannot immediately tell the painted elements from the collaged. Visual puns of source and scale appear throughout: paper doilies become lace tablecloths in Portrait Collage #7, #9, and #17, a dog perches on the edge of a perpendicular rug in Portrait Collage #18, a parrot lands on the nude’s hands in Nude with Parrot #1 (Purple Wall) (1960). Objects depicted as flat surfaces create odd perspectival displacements, as seen in Portrait Collage #19. Wesselmann simply stacked (or rather pasted) the elements on the same plane without diminishing scale, a feature too of his Pop paintings to come.

“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages

Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #19, 1960, mixed media on board, 11 ½ × 7 ½ inches (29.2 × 19 cm)

Another compositional device introduced in these early collages, one that would become a regular feature in the Great American Nudes, is art-historical reference. Populating the rear walls of the spaces in both series are simulated-silver-or-gold-framed miniature reproductions of well-known paintings, ranging from canonical Renaissance, Baroque, and nineteenth-century works to the twentieth-century artist who would become Wesselmann’s greatest touchstone, Henri Matisse.19 In many respects the inclusion of these artworks is Wesselmann’s private endorsement of his preference for traditional subject matter. Inviting these masterpieces into his work, he shows both unabashed appreciation and humorous self-deprecation.

As Wesselmann’s art developed in the next decade into its classic style, the art market’s thirst for Pop art pushed his early collages aside.20 Their inherent playfulness may be considered an artistic remnant of Wesselmann’s initial devotion to cartooning. Most important, they represent a blueprint for his entire oeuvre as it unfolded in various series, different materials, and multiple formats across the arc of his forty-five-year career. Not just his subject matter is predicted in these delightfully folksy artworks, but also compositional devices and formats, whether square, rectangular, or tondo. Wesselmann’s reliance on the tenets of art history as seen through the lenses of still lifes, nudes, and interiors, all of which would become their own major series in the 1960s, are also in evidence. Even the method of application—collage—is how Wesselmann crafted his artworks at least through the mid-1960s, when he began to experiment with more modern materials, such as vacuum-formed plastics. There is no question that the Portrait Collages and Small Nudes harvested Wesselmann’s unique artistic vocabulary—a language that would take center stage on a significantly grander scale with the Great American Nudes, beginning in 1961.

Parts of this text will appear in the first chapter of Susan Davidson’s Tom Wesselmann: Great American Nudes, to be published by Gagosian and Almine Rech in 2024.


1Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann (New York: Abbeville Press, 1980), p. 11. The book is written in the third person but “Slim Stealingworth” is a pseudonym for Tom Wesselmann. The artist published his cartoons in national magazines such as 1000 Jokes Magazine, True, Cavalier, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post. Michael Lobel examines his cartoons in relation to his 1960s work in “Another Wesselmann,” in Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat. (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2016), pp. 100–121.

2Wesselmann, in Irving Sandler, “Oral history interview with Tom Wesselmann, 1984 January 3–February 8,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, p. 4.

3The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the painting from Willem de Kooning: Recent Paintings, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 2–28, 1956. In addition to the Met’s acquisition, the Museum of Modern Art owned three de Kooning paintings in the 1950s: Painting (1948), Woman I (1950–52), and Woman II (1952), the last of which Wesselmann could have seen at the museum in Recent American Acquisitions, March 14–April 30, 1957. Wesselmann also identified MoMA’s Robert Motherwell painting The Voyage (1949) as the first aesthetic experience that produced a “visual excitement in his stomach.” See Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, p. 12.

4Wesselmann’s work, however, especially in the 1960s, possesses a strong sense of humor. The artist would return to writing, but not publishing, jokes in the mid-1980s.

5The New York Times masthead from Friday, November 28, 1958, is easily discernible in the painting’s lower-left quadrant. Wesselmann recognized the similarities: “I took a slide of a collage I’d done . . . an imitation Rauschenberg, a total imitation, so much so I was embarrassed [when] I look[ed] back on it not much long after.” See Wesselmann interviewed by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin for their “Art and Artists: 1945–1965” project, February 5, 1991, New York, tape 180b. I would like to thank Martin for generously allowing me access to this unpublished interview.

6Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, p. 13.

7Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview., January 21, 1991, tape 180a.

8Ibid.

9Ibid.

10The numbering that the artist assigned to this series, and indeed to all of his early artworks, does not accurately reflect the order of their fabrication. Wesselmann did not start his registry book (the inventory of his artworks recorded as they were made) until April 1962. Those Portrait Collages not dated on the artwork itself he dated based on his memory; Portrait Collage #20, for example, is ascribed to 1961, while Portrait Collage #23 is ascribed to 1959. See TW Registry Book, Estate of Tom Wesselmann Archives.

11“That’s why I title things with numbers because the works were fraught already with all kinds of poetic possibilities that you could . . . read things into it.” Wesselmann, in Sandler, “Oral history interview with Tom Wesselmann,” p. 27.

12By contrast, Portrait of Jimmy (n.d.), Self-Portrait Collage (1960), Dad in Boat (1960), and Ann with Strawberries (1961) identify their sitter. With the exception of Ann with Strawberries, these are the only Portrait Collages that depict men with the addition of an unidentified male sitter in Portrait Collage #23 (1959). The only work in the series that is not a portrait is Porch (1960).

13Portrait Collage #3 and Portrait Collage #19 are vertical and Portrait Collage #7 and Portrait Collage #26 are tondos.

14Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview, tape 180b.

15This idea was suggested by Don Quaintance, email exchange with the author, February 25, 2021.

16Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, p. 15.

17Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview, January 21, 1991, tape 181a.

18Judy Putting on Stockings, Standing Nude with Black Hat and Stockings, Judy Undressing, Judy Putting on Stockings, Red Fish on Table, Judy Trimming Toenails, Yellow Hair, After Matisse (all 1960), and Starry Night Nude (1959) are vertical and Judy (Oval) (1959) is a tondo.

19Wesselmann’s art-historical references include: Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) in Woman with Interior; Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1503–7) in Portrait Collage #16; Titian’s Rape of Europa (1551–62) in Blue Nude; Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1660) in Portrait Collage #18; Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814) in Portrait Collage #17; Degas’s Woman Seated by a Vase of Flowers (1865) in Portrait Collage #14; Ingres’s Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc (1823) in Portrait Collage #7; and Renoir’s Theater Loge (1874) in Judy Dressing at Night, NYC. Matisse’s Woman in Blue (1937) appears in both Portrait Collage #21 and Judy Trimming her Toenails (Yellow Wall). 

20The early collages were first shown in Exhibition: Marc Ratliff Paintings / Tom Wesselmann Collages, Judson Gallery, New York, May 8–31, 1960. Wesselmann remarked, “Luckily I kept half the show—the only smart thing I did. . . . It was such an interesting, to me, body [of] first work. . . . Someday I’ll get them all to a museum and we’ll deal with the whole body.” In Klüver/Martin interview, tape 180a. These early works would not be seen publicly again until 1974 in the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: The Early Years, Collages 1959–1962, at the Art Galleries, California State University, Long Beach. Parts of the series were revisited in a later exhibition, The Intimate Images, at the same venue in 2003. Since then the works have been included in exhibitions and discussed in the literature with greater frequency. Most recently, a focused presentation was presented at the David Zwirner Gallery, London, in 2016.

Tom Wesselmann: Intimate Spaces, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, May 3–June 16, 2023

Artworks by Tom Wesselmann © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York; photos, unless otherwise noted: Jeffrey Sturges

Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2023

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023

The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.

Two people sit across from each other in front of Tom Wesselmann’s painting “Great American Nude #53”

In Conversation
Susan Davidson and Jeffrey Sturges

On the occasion of the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: Intimate Spaces at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, Susan Davidson sat down with Jeffrey Sturges to discuss the artist’s key works in his Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series.

The Parameters of Perception

The Parameters of Perception

Michael Craig-Martin and Jeffrey Sturges in conversation on Tom Wessselmann’s Standing Still Lifes. 

Richard Phillips on Tom Wesselmann

Richard Phillips on Tom Wesselmann

Tom Wesselmann: Standing Still Lifes closes this week at Gagosian New York. In this text, Richard Phillips speaks with Jason Ysenburg about the impact of the exhibition. A video about the exhibition and the artist’s studio practice accompanies the text.

Tom Wesselmann: In the Studio

Tom Wesselmann: In the Studio

Join us for a look at Tom Wesselmann’s New York studio in this behind-the-scenes video. Featuring archival footage of Wesselmann at work, as well as new interviews with his family, studio team, and friends, the film documents the creative process behind his large-scale works, from early still lifes to later abstractions.

Tom Wesselmann

Spotlight
Tom Wesselmann

The story behind Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #59 (1972). Text by Lauren Mahony.

Reinventing the Nude

Reinventing the Nude

Modern master Henri Matisse was a touchstone for American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann throughout his career.

One-Cent Life

Book Corner
One-Cent Life

A 1964 publication by the Chinese-American artist and poet Walasse Ting and Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis.

Black and white portrait of Lisa Lyon

Lisa Lyon

Fiona Duncan pays homage to the unprecedented, and underappreciated, life and work of Lisa Lyon.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland

Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art

Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.

Black and white portrait of Alexey Brodovitch

Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch

Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Installation view with Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–)

Douglas Gordon: To Sing

On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.