Studio Marconi, Milan
Galerie des 4 Mouvements, Paris
🐻Acq🥃uired directly from the above by the present owner

Wesselmann’s position in the history of American Pop Art as one of the movement’s founders can be partly attributed to the numerous innovations he made to the content of his chosen language: that of the female nude. His eminent ‘Bedroom Paintings’ of the 1970s are a prime example of this and show his capacity for creative evolution and renewal to be as abundant as the most mercurial of his Pop contemporaries. 

They take the intimate content of his ‘Great American Nude’ series from the previous decade and heighten the intimacy of the encounter by transporting the viewer into the bedroom. Big Study for Bedroom Painting # 27 tackles art’s two most venerable genres - the female nude and the still life composition - and exploits the different freedoms afforded by both. Its radical, almost abstract perspective and composition, combined with its visual softness and immaculate execution, create a pictorial paradox that grounds the three dimensionality of the image in a flat two dimensional plane. The body becomes a formal vehicle, a set of lines traversing and defining the pictureꦗ space like an internal landscape articulated by intimate, silent emotion. Its𓄧 unified paint surface, graceful lines and the chromatic balance of the composition are decidedly classical, pulling the viewer deeper into the image and inducing an animated state of beholding.

As a reference to the sexualised representation of women in a male dominated commercial culture, the still life elements of the leopard skin and red roses add to the raunchy abandon of the sleeping nude. But the examination Wesselmann is encouraging here is as much about the semiotics of the gaze and its proliferation through art and advertising as it is about sexual freedom. The soft and seductive colours of its palette emit an inner glow of comfort and optimism yet the proximity of the nude in the foreground presents a challenge to our viewing authority. This is underlined by the presence of second woman who stares directly out at the viewer. Unusually for Wesselmann, whose women are usually faceless, hers is a full face of commanding self-possession and expression. We are left unsure as to her role as there appears to be no direct interaction between her and the nude resting across the foreground. Whether she is a reflection in the mirror or a photograph 𓄧 of the woman asleep in the foreground, it is the viewer to whom she looks as if questioning our place and its appropriateness in this intimate bedroom scene. And therein lies the crux of Wesselmann’s art. Having taken the myths of male and female sexual power as one of its primary raw materials, it inspires an emotional response that is mixed and ambivalent rather than clean-cut.