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TOM WESSELMANN AND THE GATES OF HORN
J.A. Abramson
It appears that the furor, recriminations and repatriation among the critics and public of 1961-62 are over; we seem to be approaching a condition of general amnesty where Pop art is concerned. The transition from the "Pop sensationalism" and "neo-Dada" labels of that period to the present easy acceptance of Pop as bona fide art is to the painters themselves no more than the attainment of an equilibrium corresponding to their own personal and constant refining of style. The point which is often overlooked is that these styles of Pop as we see them today are not in the main the results of a sudden realization of satori in 1960 or 1961, but rather the consequences of a continuing and fairly steady process of stylistic evolution in the work of most of the "first generation" Pop artists. As the current show (May 11-June 4) at the Sidney Janis Gallery indicates, this quality of steady and, in a sense, logical progression is especially evident in the work of Wesselmann.
By now, most of us agree that Pop is art. But is it Pop? This question is a pertinent one where Wesselmann is concerned, particularly when we confront numerous statements by the artist that reject the label. Whether we attempt to consider Pop as a style or as a movement, at this date we still seem to tack a clear understanding of the unifying factors in this art. I think it is a mistake to label anything that happens to use "common-object" or "pop" subject matter as Pop art. There is certainly a difference, if only one of intent, between the utilization of this type of subject matter by Duchamp in the early decades of this century, by such artists as Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and Boris Lurie at the present time, and its use by such as Wesselmann, Warhol and Lichtenstein. Pop as conceived by the last three artists is not Dada. It lacks the polemical content and program of Dada and has an entirely distinct interest in formal manipulations. Pop would seem, contrary to Dada, to be a uniquely and purposefully passive kind of art, not in its choice or handling of subject matter, but rather in its attitude toward subject matter and, by extension, toward art itself. In this sense, Pop is more closely allied to urban beatnikism and its aesthetic of "the immediacy and unrelatedness of everything" than it is to Dada. The conception of man as a free-floating and passive perceiver, traveling by Brownian movement from experience to experience, is in many ways parallel to the Pop artist's "acceptance" of objects, be they artifacts of mass culture, natural objects or art objects. This is subtly different from just a broadening of the categories of subject-matter choice, as the choice of subject matter is still predicated on factors of artistic impact. It is rather a different conception of subject matter, concerned much more with the integrity and meaning of the image than that of the painting as an aesthetic entity.
The choice of "pop" subjects is, of course, to be expected when we consider the new attitude expressed in these paintings. In away, the painting now is often no more than an excuse or a pretext for an exploration of images - not images which might or might not make a good painting, but images that are encountered.
This does not mean that Pop paintings are necessarily "passive" paintings. (Some of them, the good ones, have a power and presence that is anything but passive - because they happen, coincidentally, to be good paintings as well as Pop paintings.) What it does mean is that the artist has not only broadened his subject matter, but that he regards subject matter at one level, no matter what its nature might be. He does not approach things; they approach him. This is a "bridging of art and life" in a way, but even more it is a use of art as a means to document the results of an approach to life. ln this sense, Henry Geldzahler is correct when he refers to Pop as being the "new landscape painting," and Andy Warhol's "Pop art is knowing how to live" begins to make a sort of sense.
An interest in cartooning marked Wesselmann's initial contact with art (he studied this for a year at Cincinnati Art Academy before transferring, on the advice of a professor, to Cooper Union in New York), and the essentially emblematic nature of the feet, mouths and nipples of his present work could possibly be thought of as a return to "pure" cartoon. Whether or not this is the case, the artist has arrived at his present style by way of a rigorously single-minded and oddly hermetic path. The Nude with Parrot No. 1 of 1960 mirrors an involvement with Pollock and de Kooning which was not restricted to Wesselmann alone, but seems to be a common factor in the background of most of the present Pop artists. Many of Wesselmann's works of this period show forward projection and illustrate the artist's attempt to cope with the problems posed by de Kooning and Pollock. Wesselmann has stated that "de Kooning was an immense obstacle for me ... I almost gave up painting because he'd done it already. I couldn't conceive of any other way of painting than de Kooning's." Pollock represented a similar obstacle, though less central. Thus we see this nude disintegrated, spread out, over and through the canvas, with her arm and leg thrown back to become involved with the rear areas and edges of the painting. This lateral compression and attempted all-over patternization relate in an obvious way to Pollock and de Kooning (as does the uniting of the positive and negative shapes), but also spring from an interest in collage that was present from the beginnings of the artist's career: "The fact is, I began with an interest in collage, which I first used in 1959 in art school." The development from an art-school de Kooningesque style to a translation of this into collage format can readily be seen in some of the works of late 1959 and early 1960, such as The Lousy Haircut and another collage which uses a cut-out Matisse nude. At this time Wesselmann made his decision that he was by nature a figurative painter, a painter of objects.
The Great American Nude series begins in the middle of 1961. According to the artist, the theme came to mind first and the concurrent palette restriction (to red, white and blue) of the early GAN's was primarily an excuse to justify the use of the theme. A sudden interest in size of the works also occurs at this time. Earlier, Wesselmann had been convinced that he was an "intimate" painter, and had restricted himself to works that could conveniently be held on his lap. The Nude with Parrot No. 1 of 1960 is no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, but the GAN No. 6 of late 1960 and the GAN No. 12 of 1961 are both four feet square; the GAN No. 30 of 11963 is four by five feet, and the Still Life No. 36 of 1963 is over ten feet high. This trend has continued up to the present; most of the figures in the current show are life-size - or much larger, in the case of the body fragments.
As can be seen from the GAN No. 12, by 1961 Wesselmann had arrived at the basic elements of his style, but was still searching for technique and conception. The influence of Nicholas Marsicano, under whom he studied at Cooper Union, can be seen in many of the nudes of this period, especially in the limiting of the female to a thick flowing outline with the sensuousness of the body occurring within. The artist was pursuing a program of conscious eclecticism at this time, doing intensive studies of Matisse's and Mondrian's styles. However, it is a misconception to think that Wesselmann turned to Mondrian and consciously adopted elements of that painter's technique in an effort to "get around de Kooning." Wesselmann had long admired the freedom and sloppy elegance of de Kooning, but felt that this quality was just not a part of his nature. Mondrian represented "another kind of wildness" and thus served as an inspirational example rather than a possible format to be followed and extended.
Since early 1960, Wesselmann has progressed along a path of constant simplification of images, but this was inherent in his attitude toward objects as "emblems." This simplification is also characteristic of his early palettes. The paintings were not so much dominated by one color as they were predicated on an arbitrary, "emblematic" conception of color. Grass was green, sky was blue, the body pink, etc.: a pure, bright palette with no nuances and with a conscious avoidance of the "poetic." This palette persisted, with some broadening, until late 11965, when modeling, as in the foot in Seascape No. 1, began to creep into the figures. It was this simplification to a "nucleus of style" coupled with the constant figurative intrusion of collage and assemblage elements that formed the basis of his style as seen today. Wesselmann has recently, however, made what seems to be an effort toward a more clear-cut statement of non-poetic color; the blues and greens of his seascapes are deliberately artificial and "commercial" in appearance, their obvious spuriousness reinforcing the artist's conception of painted objects as signs or abbreviations. The yellow beach and green ocean of Seascape No. 7, in the current show, are of this genus and demonstrate this shift from a use of the basic characteristic color of objects to a more sophisticated concept of color itself as an emblem or sign.
The "conscious eclecticism" mentioned above is most centrally related to the artist's deliberate restriction of format to the classical categories of painting: still life, landscape (or seascape), interior, portrait, nude. Of these, the only one untouched to date is the portrait category, and this, so far as particularized renderings of people are concerned, will probably remain so. The majority of his works fall into three originally separate themes: the GAN's (some of which can be considered as interiors as well as nudes), the landscape-seascapes, and the still lifes. These have recently been tending to merge, as in the nude-seascapes and the still-life insertions in the GAN'S.
At first glance, one would be tempted to label the subject matter completely "pop," but, according to the artist, this is a superficial comment. It has been said that Warhol very carefully selects the images that somehow seem most pertinent, compellingly pertinent, to all of us. This does not occur with Wesselmann and has nothing to do with his choices. The sentiments of Warhol - "I love Campbell's Soup; I used to have it for lunch every day" - are not to be found in Wesselmann's paintings or behind his choices. He has no "love" (or hate) for anything until it is in a painting or subjugated to a painterly situation: "I use 'pop' subject matter because I recognize in it opportunistic situations." Wesselmann's progressively increasing cropping of the female image to some degree exemplifies this attitude toward subjects, painting and images. He has gone from almost full figures, as in GAN No. 51 (1963) and GAN No. 58 (1965), to torsos as in GAN No. 74 (October 1965), and to today's anatomical fragments consisting of legs, feet, mouths and breasts.
The artist states that he is not painting any specific woman or mouth, or any specific type of woman, but just woman. However, it is a fact that most of these works are done from a specific model, the artist's wife, and the figures as seen relate directly to the conformations of her body. But, to Wesselmann, she is Woman; and the paintings begin, in an unspecific, non-portrait fashion, with her and are immediately extended to representations of generalized Woman. The simplification and cropping are results of this pursuit of the essence, in an emblematic sense, of this object-idea. The nipples, the "real" pubic hair, of earlier works and the gigantic cut-out mouths (which are derived from collage-movie mouths) are not meant to be real; rather they are emblems of the complex of ideas and associations engendered by encounters with the real. They are, and I hesitate to use the term, almost complete symbols. Of course, Wesselmann has played with the opposite side of this coin; "I began with a simple enough idea ... I was interested in collage, applying it to strictly realistic situations; so, a figurative piece of collage became a tree, a piece of wallpaper became a wall, and so on." But, ". . . two years ago, painting was king. Then I did the plastic piece with apples and radio [Still Life No. 46] . . . , then less and less of the paintings as an entity and more and more of the image ... the integrity of the painting didn't matter anymore; now it is the integrity of the image."
To date, the elements of Wesselmann's evolution seem to center around an increasing size of the total composition, a broadening of palette, an increasingly tight and unified composition, a greater use of trompe-l'oeil effects (such as the use of landscape photographs, real space and objects), an increasing simplicity of image, more fragmentation and "close-up" views and an increase in specifically sexual imagery. The increased compositional tightness can easily be seen in a comparison between the GAN No. 12 of 1961, the GAN No. 58 of 1965 and the Seascape No. 7 of late 1965. It is accomplished through a reduction in the number of elements, a more rigorous compartmentalization of space and a more diagrammatic rendering of masses. The increasing simplicity I've mentioned is functional to this, and certainly a logical progression because related to the desired intensity of image.
As was noted earlier, formally Wesselmann's work is not passive. The increase in sexual imagery is a direct result of a definite and increasingly powerful commitment to pornographic subject matter. Of course, if an artist is deliberately seeking a generalized, pictorial "essence" of woman, the pornographic, in the form of rather specific renderings of genitalia, is bound to figure in the proceedings at some time or another. But this is only part of the story where Wesselmann is concerned. He is actively in favor of the abolition of the term and the concept "pornography":
I am interested in pornography and certain aspects of my work are pornographic ... and certain aspects of my intentions are pornographic. But pornography is one part of life, and that's one part of my work. To say that that characterizes my work would be going much too far ... but, first of all, I don't agree with pornography. I don't really mean anything when I say "pornographic," but there are things I want to say, in paintings, about the validity of doing it, the fact that these things are suppressed and they shouldn't be ...
This not only implies that, for Wesselmann, pornography is in the eye of the beholder, but hints at a further and broader attitude: that the viewer of the painting should and can bring a great deal of the subject matter of the work of art with him to the painting. Any semantic entity, whether it be a word, a "standard" emblem such as a Campbell's Soup can or a more generalized sign such as a wet, spongy, Hollywood mouth, requires the perceiver or viewer of the sign to make the necessary connection from sign to what is signified. The use of a taped sound track of wine being poured into a glass in Still Life No. 21 of 1962 and the ringing phone in GAN No. 44 of 1963 are other examples of this playing in the half-world between the object or situation and its depiction. On another level, with particular reference to Wesselmann's nudes, it is perhaps the opposite of Boris Lurie's adept transformations of female figures into graffiti. The sexuality of Wesselmann's nudes is a remarkably abstract, pristine phenomenon despite, or possibly because of, the meticulously generalized renderings of carnal attributes and trappings. We see the reclining nudes with flamboyant silk stockings and garters; ordinarily, all that these would need would be a whip and a pair of boots to become the Spider-Women of a Jersey torture house. But instead the soft colors and blank faces make us think of "creatures met on Malibu Beach." It is as if the Great American Nude series represents the results of a fractional distillation of all the femininity in the world, with an end product, tightly stoppered, of pure essence of Woman. A clinical specimen.
Even as specimens, these new paintings have considerable blasting power. Part of this is due to a further progression in the evolution of the artist's concept of the form as mass on a flat surface. In 1962, a noticeable characteristic of many of Wesselmann's nudes (see GAN No. 21, 30 and 39) is an interior line just within the edge where the body meets the other areas of the painting. This interior line is present in most of the works of 1962, but then drops out and is not to be seen again until late 1965. However, in this later series of works, the line is not within the figure, but is represented by a series of lines, graded in value, belonging to the color plane as it meets the body edge. For example, if the body meets a dark blue plane (as in Seascape No. 7), the line of junction is approached by blue lines which get progressively lighter in value as they near the body edge. In the works of 1962 mentioned above, this seems to be a perfunctory modeling of the body area, or perhaps a hang-over of the heavy outline of the earlier, Marsicano-influenced works. In the present works it also functions to model the fragments of the body around which it appears, but has an intense, vibratory effect completely unlike anything in Wesselmann's earlier work.
The diagrammatic, ambiguous area which comprises the nude body in its entirety or in part in the pre-1965 works sometimes shows a tendency, because of the hard edge and because of the intense value and color contrasts, to break away from its spatial position and float above or jump around the surface of the picture plane. The hard edge begins to break down, because of the thinness of the collision. With this new handling of edges, Wesselmann blunts these hard, thin collisions and manages to make the body part appear more rounded, ruling out any floating of the image that would cause it to lose solidity. This reinforcement of solidity naturally causes the image to project outward more strongly, and the effect is a particularly powerful one. A certain amount of the vibratory effect seems to come from a mixing of hue as the lines lighten in value, so that the blue lines, as they become lighter and approach the body, begin to show some intrusion of pink within them. I feel, however, that the effect of round mass, which is evident even in black and white, is a function of value manipulation almost entirely. The inclination, when one first sees this, is to say "Aha, Op! " but I would imagine that this technique is the result, again, of Wesselmann's experience with collage. A collage inclusion, even if only thin tissue paper, has a definite edge, and the holding power of an edge-with-substance in Wesselmann's paintings establishes an extremely effective artificial collage.
"Extremely effective" is perhaps the key phrase for Wesselmann's current show. The cutouts, of the full nudes and of the mouths and feet, are almost hypnotic in their intensity, though deceptively close, when first seen, to some of Rosenquist's devices. The difference would seem to be that while Rosenquist is painting real (although billboard-size) objects, the Wesselmann fragments are schemata. The appearance of these parts on the earlier whole nudes or torsos must be kept in mind, as the new isolated ones are their progeny. The present paintings are huge, rich and heavy, but at the same time their economy of means lends them a strange quality of timelessness and lightness. Both as images and as deliberately generalized associational triggers, the works have immense power.
Arts, May 1966: 43-48
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