Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above circa 1985

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Recent Work by Tom Wesselmann, May 1982

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a wood strip frame with gold facing.
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.
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Beginning in 1967, Tom Wesselmann embarked on an ambitious series of works entitled the Bedroom Paintings which were a natural progression from his Great American Nudes and Still Life paintings of the early 1960s. For this body of work, Wesselmann, an already celebrated Pop artist, moved his perspective and ours closer to the subject at hand, spotlighting close-up details of a female subject's sensuous attributes, such as her breast, mouth or ꦜtoes.  Adjacent to the figure, the viewer can glimpse objects from a typical Wesselmann still-life, including flowers, fruit, or cigarettes. Paintings from this series were frequently large in scale and thus were visually all encompassing as Wesselmann placed the subject in the immediate foreground of the picture plane. Ultimately, the artist explored how the scale and heightened spatial relations of the larger-than-life objects and female conveyed the sumptuous and sensuous nature of sexuality. 

It has been said that Wesselmann was "consistently successful at achieving a maximum of visual intensity while also maintaining some semblance of realism" (Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 79). The present work is just that: a paramount example of one of the artist's most striking and iconic Bedroom paintings. In Bedroom Painting #44, the visual narrative juxtaposes a variety of brightly colored images in a well-balanced composition. The artist positions two blooming flowers, including the provocative daffodil, adjacent to a luxurious satin black pillow which is situated just in front of the woman's sensual profile. N🎐o longer just line and color, the skin and features of the woman's face are more shaded than the generalized and flat skin tones of the artist's earlier nudes, creating greater depth in the overall composition, further enhanced by the surrounding still life. The hard-edged and austere light switch and fragment of curtains are the only hints of the three-dimensional interior space. Tightly composed and saturated with vivid areas of dynamic color, the bedroom scene transforms the ordinary into an erotic and intimate moment. As a result of Wesselmann's keen attention to color and proportion, this work demonstrates the artist's ability to create an extreme sense of theatricality which transports the viewer into the composition, and therefore, into the bedroom.

For his interiors, Wesselmann had long employed signs and symbols whose expressive power derives from the intentional use of highly sexualized objects. The blooming flowers in the foreground of Bedroom Painting No. 44 can be read as fertile and virile, bursting with pollen. The light switch prominently placed right of the female subject is turned on. Wesselmann's clean lines and tightly modeled and shaded contours derive from the images and graphic style frequently found in popular media such as advertisements, billboards and magazines. This cool, seemingly removed hand of the artist makes the subject ironically more salacious. Moreover, since the female subject is not a specific or known person, the artist elevates one's fantasy about the sitter, asking the viewer to continue the narrative in one's imagination. The sitter's mouth𒊎 seems to be caught in the mid-breath of ecsta🌳sy and through the title of the painting, we understand that the highly sexualized nature of the subject takes place behind closed doors.

While Bedroom Painting No. 44 is not the overtly sexualized depiction of a nude as compared to the full-reclining nudes of the Great American Nude series, the painting nevertheless has strong erotic associations. In Bedroom Painting No. 44 , the artist focuses our attention on the profile of the brunette. Her downcast eyes and open mouth abound with hints of jubilation or lascivious expectation. Earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, Wesselmann had elevated the disembodied red lips of his female archetype into a series of paintings devoted solely to the mouth.  Always parted and occasionally swathed in the wispy smoke of a cigarette, the luscious lips of paintings such as Mouth #1 were the artist's ultimate abstraction of female sensuality. According to Slim Stealingworth, "Wesselmann is more excited about these huge faces, soft and inviting in exactly the way a nude might be. The parts of the face at times become like the body parts—eyes, brows, and lips become as erotically pertinent as nipples, breasts and pubic areas" (Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 72). 

In the 1935 Surrealist painting, The Rape, Rene Magritte, chose to remove the mouth of the female subject and replace it with her pubic area. Thus, the entry point for pleasure and expression is a sexua♔l organ. In contrast, Wesselmann elevates the subject's mouth as the primary entry point for gratification. Finally, it is the Pop artist's slick rendering of the detail of the subject's face that allows one to get a sense of the highly charged sexual energy his female sitter imbues.