“I am searching for the other’s body, he wrote. I am calm, attentive, as if I
were confronted by a strange insect of which I am suddenly no longer
afraid. Certain parts of the body are particularly appropriate to this
observation, eyelashes, nails, roots of the hair, the incomplete objects.”
R.Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, NewYork, 1978
“When I started working big, eroticism was a component of my work. It was
just like part of the collage, like everything else. It was not the point of the
work, because my work has always been more formal, more composed,
than to be that involved with making something erotic. But eroticism was,
especially in the beginning, part of my work. Originally it was part of my
work like Abstract Expressionist brushwork was: it was—we didn’t have the
expression then—‘in your face’. Since I couldn’t use the Abstract
Expressionist brushwork anymore—I had dropped that—I had to find other
ways of making the painting, the image, aggressive. And moving forward
like that—Abstract Expressionist paintings were always moving forward,
and the shapes were constantly off the canvas, in your eye, in your face—
eroticism was one of the tools for me to try to accomplish that.”
T. Buschsteiner & O. Letze, eds., Tom Wesselmann, Ostfildern, 1996
The female nude is an age-old motif in figural painting, a subject
historically treated with a delicacy and tastefulness bordering on
reverence.TomWesselmann, by way of translating the visceral energy of
Abstract Expressionist gesture into the flat, graphic style that would
become indelibly associated with Pop art, seized upon the image of the
female nude as an outlet for this energy in the early 1960s and never looked
back. His iconic nudes, rendered over the course of his career in the
form of paintings, drawings, collage and metalwork, are uniformly reduced
to flat textures, primary colors, and key physical attributes—lips,
nipples—that forcefully exude a previously unheard-of degree of sensuality
and eroticism without ever descending into vulgarity. “Almost without
exception,Wesselmann’s images appeal to the pleasure principle within
us and contribute to the sense of delectation exuded on a more visceral
level by the conjunction of particular shapes, textures, and colors.
The selection of motif is only part of the equation by which the artist
conveys sensations of desire to the point of satiation.” (Ibid.)