Tom Wesselmann - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, November 16, 2012 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Icon Ltd. Contemporary Art, Santa Monica

  • Catalogue Essay

    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.
    TOM WESSELMANN

    (Tom Wesselmann quoted in “Telling it like it is,” M. Livingstone, Tom Wesselmann, Ostfldern, Cantz Verlag, 1994, p. 9).

  • Artist Biography

    Tom Wesselmann

    American • 1931 - 2004

    As a former cartoonist and leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Tom Wesselmann spent many years of his life repurposing popular imagery to produce small to large-scale works that burst with color. Active at a time when artists were moving away from the realism of figurative painting and growing increasingly interested in abstraction, Wesselmann opted for an antithetical approach: He took elements of city life that were both sensual and practical and represented them in a way that mirrored Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol's own methodologies.

    Wesselmann considered pop culture objects as exclusively visual elements and incorporated them in his works as pure containers of bold color. This color palette became the foundation for his now-iconic suggestive figurative canvases, often depicting reclining nudes or women's lips balancing a cigarette.

    View More Works

199

Open Ended Nude #146

1981
pencil and liquatex on board
3 3/4 x 8 3/4 in. (9.5 x 22.2 cm)
Signed, titled, and dated “#146, Wesselmann 81” lower left; further signed, titled, and dated “Wesselmann 81, Open Ended Nude #146” on the reverse.

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for $79,300

Contemporary Art Day Sale

16 November 2012
New York