Up
for auction a RARE! "Pop Art" Tom Wesselmann Hand Signed 3X5,5 Card Dated 1963. This item is authenticated by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes
with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-6714
Thomas
K. Wesselmann (February
23, 1931 – December 17, 2004) was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who
worked in painting, collage and sculpture. Wesselmann was born at Cincinnati.From
1949 to 1951 he attended college in Ohio; first at Hiram College,
and then transferred to major in Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He was drafted
into the US Army in
1952, but spent his service years stateside. During that time he made his first
cartoons, and became interested in pursuing a career in cartooning. After his
discharge he completed his psychology degree in 1954, whereupon he began to
study drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He achieved
some initial success when he sold his first cartoon strips to the
magazines 1000 Jokes and True.
Cooper Union accepted
him in 1956, and he continued his studies in New York. During a visit to
the MoMA he
was inspired by the Robert
Motherwell painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic:
“The first aesthetic experience… He felt a sensation of high visceral
excitement in his stomach, and it seemed as though his eyes and stomach were
directly connected”. Wesselmann
also admired the work of Willem de
Kooning, but he soon rejected action
painting: “He realized he had to find his own passion he felt he had
to deny to himself all that he loved in de Kooning, and go in as opposite a
direction as possible." For Wesselmann, 1958 was a pivotal year. A
landscape painting trip to Cooper Union's Green Camp in rural New Jersey,
brought him to the realization that he could pursue painting, rather than
cartooning, as a career. After graduation, Wesselmann became one of the
founding members of the Judson Gallery, along with Marc Ratliff
and Jim Dine,
also from Cincinnati, who had just arrived in New York. He and Ratliff showed a
number of small collages in a two-man exhibition at Judson Gallery. He began to
teach art at a public school in Brooklyn,
and later at the High School of Art and Design. Wesselmann's
series Great American Nude (begun 1961) first brought him to
the attention of the art world. After a dream concerning the phrase "red,
white, and blue", he decided to paint a Great American Nude in
a palette limited to those colors and any colors associated with patriotic
motifs such as gold and khaki. The
series incorporated representational images with an accordingly patriotic
theme, such as American landscape photos and portraits of founding fathers.
Often these images were collaged from magazines and discarded posters, which
called for a larger format than Wesselmann had used previously. As works began
to approach a giant scale he approached advertisers directly to acquire
billboards. Through Henry
Geldzahler, Wesselmann met Alex Katz,
who offered him a show at the Tanager Gallery. Wesselmann's first solo
show was held there later that year, representing both the large and
small Great American Nude collages. In 1962, Richard Bellamy
offered him a one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery.
About the same time, Ivan Karp of the Leo Castelli Gallery put
Wesselmann in touch with several collectors and talked to him about Roy
Lichtenstein and James
Rosenquist’s works. These Wesselmann viewed without noting any
similarities with his own {S. Stealingworth, p. 25}. While not a cohesive
movement, the idea of Pop Art (a name coined by Lawrence
Alloway and others) was gradually spreading among
international art critics and the public. In As Henry
Geldzahler observed: “About a year and a half ago I saw the works of
Wesselmann..., Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios (it was more
or less July 1961). They were working independently, unaware of each other, but
drawing on a common source of imagination. In the space of a year and a half
they put on exhibitions, created a movement and we are now here discussing the
matter in a conference. This is instant history of art, a history of art that
became so aware of itself as to make a leap that went beyond art itself”. The Sidney Janis Gallery held
the New Realists exhibition in November 1962, which included
works by the American artists Jim Dine, Robert
Indiana, Roy
Lichtenstein, Claes
Oldenburg, James
Rosenquist, George Segal, and Andy Warhol;
and Europeans such as Arman, Enrico Baj, Christo, Yves Klein,
Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, Jean Tinguely,
and Mario Schifano. It followed the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition at the Galerie
Rive Droite in Paris,
and marked the international debut of the artists who soon gave rise to what
came to be called Pop Art in Britain and The United States and Nouveau Réalisme on the European
continent. Wesselmann took part in the New Realist show with
some reservations, exhibiting two 1962 works: Still life #17 and Still
life #22. Wesselmann never liked his inclusion in American Pop Art, pointing out how
he made an aesthetic use of everyday objects and not a criticism of
them as consumer objects: “I dislike labels in general and 'Pop' in particular,
especially because it overemphasizes the material used. There does seem to be a
tendency to use similar materials and images, but the different ways they are
used denies any kind of group intention”. That
year, Wesselmann had begun working on a new series of still lifes.
experimenting with assemblage as well as collage. In Still
Life #28 he included a television set that was turned on, “interested
in the competitive demands that a TV, with moving images and giving off light
and sound, can make on painted portions” He
concentrated on the juxtapositions of different elements and depictions, which
were at the time truly exciting for him: “Not just the differences between what
they were, but the aura each had with it... A painted pack of cigarettes next
to a painted apple wasn’t enough for me. They are both the same kind of thing.
But if one is from a cigarette ad and the other a painted apple, they are two
different realities and they trade on each other... This kind of relationship
helps establish a momentum throughout the picture... At first glance, my
pictures seem well behaved, as if – that is a still life, O.K. But these things
have such crazy give-and-take that I feel they get really very wild”. He
married Claire Selley in November 1963. In 1964 Ben Birillo, an artist and
business partner of gallery owner Paul Bianchini, contacted Wesselmann and
other Pop artists with the goal of organizing The American Supermarket at
the Bianchini Gallery in New York. This was an installation of a large
supermarket where Pop works (Warhol's Campbell's Soup, Watts's colored wax eggs
etc.) were shown among real food and neon signs. In the same year Wesselmann began
working on landscapes, including one that includes the noise of a Volkswagen starting
up. The first shaped canvas nudes also appeared this
year.