"I find sometimes I get so excited working, especially when starting new ideas; I get so excited that I get uncomfortable. It almost feels dangerous, like I’m flirting with something dangerous."
—Tom Wesselmann

Emerging to auction for the first time since its creation, the present work is an iconic iteration of Tom Wesselmann’s celebrated series of Mouth paintings. Executed in November 1967, a watershed year for the artist, Mouth #14 (Marilyn) is among the early pivotal works in the series that were conceived in tandem with Wesselmann’s first Smoker paintings. Immersing the viewer into a hypnotic erotism and graphic intensity that characterizes the best of Wesselmann’s works, here the mouth of Marilyn Monroe is transformed into a pair of sultry scarlet lips, her blonde strands of hair evoking sensual flames. Exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery the year of its creation, Mouth #14 (Marilyn) marks the apex of the Wesselmann’s mid-career painterly investigations that established him at the forefront of the Pop vanguard.

 

Among the artist’s most highly sought after works, Wesselmann’s Mouth paintings commenced in the mid-1960s as a natural extension of his Great American Nude series. Beginning with the Great American Nudes in 1961, Wesselmann placed youthful female nudes in vibrantly rendered settings while abstracting the figural form and, by the mid-decade, increasingly honed his focus on specific parts of the body. This gradual simplification led to his singular focus on mouths in the titular series initiated in 1965. The Mouth paintings eventually birthed the Smoker series in the year of the present work’s creation, when his friend and model Peggy Sarno paused for a cigarette during a session, marking the pivotal moment when Wesselmann became fascinated with smoke as a subject. Coinciding with this legendary account, the conception of Mouth #14 (Marilyn) may be viewed in parallel to this pivotal juncture. Created after Mouth #11, April 1967, Dallas Museum of Art—the first mouth with a cigarette—and in the same month as Smoker #1 (Mouth #12), Museum of Modern Art—the first work to include both a cigarette and smoke—the present work signals to Wesselmann’s interest in ephemeral smoke in the fiery wisps of hair that float across the lushly rendered lips.

 

 

Though Wesselmann began exploring shaped canvases in 1964 with his Great American Nudes, the artist advanced his investigations with the medium in the Mouth series. This body of work “represented a further evolution in the shaped canvas: a larger scale, closer views, and concentration on body parts,” he noted in his autobiography.”ⁱ As Mouth #14 (Marilyn) demonstrates, working on a grand scale allowed Wesselmann to enhance the sensational visual impact of his shaped canvases—now, its immersive proportions could subsume the viewer into an all-encompassing realm of the visceral and verboten. This breakthrough worked in tandem with his increasingly reductive and clarified style as “the paintings themselves took on a more sculptural format as the areas surrounding the objects were eliminated,” as Sam Hunter observed.ⁱⁱ In Mouth #14 (Marilyn), the perpendicular movement of the waving hair over the feminine mouth both engulf and unfurl our imagination as the artist disembodies the subject by eschewing further indicators of Marilyn. It is only by Wesselmann’s unique inclusion of her name in the title that we begin to recognize these lips as those of the iconic Hollywood starlet.

 

 

Immediately recalling Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, the present work is at once an homage to Marilyn’s iconic smile and an embodiment of the relationship between advertising and celebrity. Like Warhol, Wesselmann’s embracement of sexual iconography and American popular culture in the pursuit of beauty made Marilyn the perfect choice for his artistic investigations. Mouth #14 (Marilyn) manifests the artist’s unique Pop lexicon in approaching the universal icon, not through visual repetition as Warhol’s iteration but through visual isolation with intense singularity. In line with the previously noted disembodiment of his subject, Wesselmann along with many of his contemporaries rejected critics’ stifling views on Pop Art. “They really worship Marilyn Monroe and Coca Cola,” as he once expressed. “The importance people attach to things an artist uses is irrelevant...I use a billboard picture because it is real, special representations of something, not because it is from a billboard. Advertising images excite me mainly because of what I can make from them.”ⁱⁱⁱ

ⁱ Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 49.
ⁱⁱ Sam Hunter, “Remembering Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004): And His Alter Ego, Slim Stealingworth,” American Art, vol. 19, no. 2, Summer 2005, p. 110.
ⁱⁱⁱ Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, London, 1966, p. 80.