"When I made the decision in 1959 that I was not going to be an abstract painter; that I was going to be a representational painter...I only got started by doing the opposite of everything I loved. And in choosing representational painting, I decided to do, as my subject matter, the history of art: I would do nudes, still-lifes, landscapes, interiors, portraits, etc..."
In a watershed shift away from Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the art world in the mid-twentieth century, Tom Wesslemann made a bold return to figuration, reinterpreting symbols from the European canon of art history in a manner distinctly responsive to contemporaneous social and visual culture. Wesselmann reappraised the art historical archetypes of the female nude and still life through a contemporary lens, embedding references to consumer advertising and quotidian media symbols and yet intertwining his deep knowledge of the history of Modernism. Long Delayed Nude is an exceptionally accomplished painting from Wesselmann’s oeuvre – representative of the nexus of three of the most significant series in the artist’s six-decade career: The Great American Nude, the Still Life, and the Bedroom Paintings. Rendered over the course of seven years, Long Delayed Nude demonstrates years of thoughtful evolution in Wesselmann’s practice and incorporates the most iconography of his career.
In early 1961, Ivan Karp, gallery director at Leo Castelli Gallery, made introductions with the revolutionary artists whose work we now refer to as “Pop Art.” These giants of Contemporary art – Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist – had all been working independently of one another until Karp brought them under his fold. The dealer would later reflect on that more than anything, “The wonder of the commonplace is what they share.” (Interview with Ivan Karp, by Maureen Bray and Robert Pincus-Witten of L&M Arts, December 9, 2005)
"In all of my dimensional work I use the third dimension to intensify the two-dimensional experience. It becomes part of a vivid two-dimensional image. The third dimension, while actually existing, is only an illusion in terms of the painting, which remains my intent in a painting and not a sculptural context."
Although Wesselmann was personally enamored by the work of the Abstract Expressionists, namely Willem de Kooning, and for some t.mes even attempted to imitate his work, in the late 1950s, he took a radical break away from abstraction. First, in 1961, with the series The Great American Nude, Wesselmann began to explore the subject matter that would dominate the remainder of his career. Wesselmann’s nudes are not portraits; rather, they are investigations of a storied, classical compositional arrangement with a twist for the twentieth century. The almost faceless female bodies in his works not only harken back to the widely influential female nudes from art history, such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538 or Edouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863 but also draw upon contemporary advertisement programs and the recent history of Modernism.
In Long Delayed Nude, Wesselmann eliminates the collage elements of his early composition and rather mimics the airbrushed quality of advertisements (Tom Wesselmann’s Challenge: Painting with the History of Art”, Annabelle Teneze, 32). The artist developed a dialogue with the commonplace – juxtaposing objects inventively to play with ideas of consumerism, identity, and agency. The present painting draws upon the three most significant series of Wesselmann’s early career: the sprawled female nude, an evolution of his early silhouettes in The Great American Nudes; the varied objects around the composition invoke his first collage Still Lifes, and the composition pulls from the Bedroom Paintings. Though painted in acrylic, Long Delayed Nude retains the influence of Wesselmann’s early collages. Layering items on top of one another in the composition so that none is entirely visible and then placing them within his quintessential shaped canvas, Wesselmann reinvents the idea of the collage. Scattered throughout are elements of the artist’s characteristic visual repertoire – flowers, perfume bottles, light switches, pillows, and a framed photograph. Sprawled back in jubilation, Wesselmann’s subject is released from the refined posture of more canonical female nudes. The figure leans back – her head is upside-down relative to the viewer. Only her chest, neck, and left arm are visible, forming the shape of an X. Well beyond human scale, Wesselmann’s subject becomes less a portrait and more a symbol for the viewer: the redefined female nude.
Besides the faceless central figure, Wesselmann features a framed photograph of a woman. This motif appears throughout Wesselmann’s Bedroom Paintings in a self-reflexive stat.mes nt about the identity and role of the nudes in his paintings. While in his first major series, The Great American Nudes, Wesselmann included framed images of famous artworks – such as the Mona Lisa, Andy Warhol screenprints, or Jasper Johns flags – in this work, the artist includes an everyday framed photograph.
Wesselmann cites one of his most significant influences as Henri Matisse. In 1981, Wesselmann published an autobiography under the pseudonym “Slim Stealingworth.” In it, he charts his career and influences, giving insight into his oeuvre. He writes of himself: “Wesselmann wanted works that exploded on the wall. Matisse was an important influence in this respect. To Wesselmann, Matisse’s full use of all the components of paintings – color, shape, line, texture, etc. – offered the most promise of realizing fully the visual intensity of the elements while at the same t.mes keeping some sense of the realness of the situation depicted” (Stealingworth, note 1, page 17). Wesselmann’s figures recall Matisse’s works, such as Large Reclining Nude, 1935 in the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as, the paper “Cut Out” figures that he created later in his life.
“Both an artist and art historian, Wesselmann was mindful of his place in the history of modern art and knew that he was among the heirs of Matisse in the American century.”
Responsive to art historical tradition and the evolution of Modernism yet simultaneously radical and groundbreaking for its moment, Wesselmann’s career was critically influential to the development of art in the twentieth century. His reassertion of the figure during a t.mes of ardent abstraction and ability to reconceptualize the possibilities of the body in art foreshadow recent trends in the twenty-first century. Bold, powerful, and profoundly enveloped in art history, Wesselmann’s Long Delayed Nude is a poignant example from Wesselmann’s early career. Wesselmann masterfully proposed a reinvestigation of art history that drew upon contemporaneous visual culture and challenged the critical dismissal of figuration. His work redefines the art historical trope of the female nude: not passive, the figures are active, aggressively dominating the composition and reformulating our conceptions of their symbolism in the art historical canon.
