Tom Wesselmann - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “It was like a miracle, to be able to hold this unit of spidery lines, as though it were a drawing that had just been picked up by the lines and removed, intact, from the paper” —Tom Wesselmann.

     

    A significant contributor to the New York Pop Art movement, Tom Wesselmann gained notoriety for his American Nude series: incorporating bold coloring, striking scale, and graphic form. However, as exemplified in Delphinium and Daisies, his thematic interests were not limited to popular culture. Rather, throughout his career, he engaged with a multitude of historical genres, seeking a holistic dialogue within the canon of painting. 

     

    In later years, Wesselmann forged his own artistic path, maturing into a new stage of creativity that extended beyond the codified lexicon of Pop, which typically depicted the female figure and consumer culture. During the 1970s, he began to fully explore the fields of landscape and still-life painting, using the foundation of these traditional categories to create new signature techniques and creative approaches in laser-cut metal. 

      

    This shift in outlook was partly due to his new country home in upstate New York, which became central to his family life and artistic practice as a space he retreated to six months each year. In poetry and drawing, Wesselmann thus burgeoned his love for the natural world, exploring the often overlooked, quieter genres of still life and landscape. Subsequently transplanting these observational studies of flora and fauna as the subject of his most technologically innovative projects in metalwork with the laser, he successfully rejuvenated and advanced such genres. As one of the earliest proponents of this method, such works exemplify the two core elements of his practice: the continuous role of drawing as a creative starting point and his desire to push the boundaries of any chosen medium.

     

    Metal in nature yet organic in form, Delphinium and Daisies is a work that invokes Wesselmann's playful approach, an artist always seeking to surprise and inspire a viewer through quotidian subject matter. The delicate, bright blue flowers of this humble country bouquet are both beautiful and signify a radical new exploration of draftsmanship. Existing neither as sculpture nor painting, neither drawing nor relief, this laser-cut steel sculpture calls for a bespoke categorization, wherein the two and three-dimensional spatial planes converge, providing a new tactile quality to the familiar artist's 'sketch.' 

    • Literature

      Wildenstein Plattner Institute E19
      Klaus Honnef, Tom Wesselman Flowers, p. 74

    • 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

115

Delphinium and Daisies (W.P.I. E19)

1989-1992
Alkyd oil in colors, on cut out steel relief.
52 x 14 5/8 x 1/8 in. (132.1 x 37.1 x .3 cm)
Signed, dated and numbered 3/25 in pencil (there were also 6 artist's proofs), co-published by the artist and Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for $184,150

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 18 - 20 April 2023