Tom Wesselmann (1931 - 2004)

Study for Bedroom Painting #31

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Oil on canvas
20.3 x 26 cm (8 x 10 ¹/₄ inches)
Signed, dated twice and titled on the reverse
Executed in 1972

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Provenance

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Private collection, USA, acquired from the above
Exhibitions

Paris, Galerie Des 4 Mouvements, Tom Wesselmann: Peintures, 7 March - 31 March 1974, no. 13 (illustrated)
Description

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1923, Wesselmann was a defining figure of Pop art in the twentieth century. Departing from Abstract Expressionism, which had dominated American art in the 1950s, Wesselmann sought to redefine figurative art. His work centred around reimaging the nude, fusing advertising tropes and everyday objects with his signature saturated palette.

The present work belongs to Wesselmann’s celebrated Bedroom Paintings (1968-83), a series considered central to his oeuvre. In these works, he isolates fragments of the body and places them beside familiar bedroom objects such as flowers and a light switch, to heighten focus and suggest a moment observed at close range.

Study for Bedroom Painting #31, is a prime example from the series, combining bold colour and an assemblage sensibility. The paint handling remains notably delicate, with the scale of the work adding to the overall feeling of intimacy.

This painting is a study for Bedroom Painting #31, completed in 1973 and now in the Musée de Grenoble, France. Closely related in composition, the study offers collectors a standalone version of a work held in a museum collection.

This work is registered under number 72-9 in the archive of the Tom Wesselmann Estate, New York.

This original painting by Tom Wesselmann is available for sale.

Artist's Biography

Born in Cincinnati, Tom Wesselmann studied at Hiram College and the University of Cincinnati, graduating in psychology. Military service in the early 1950s coincided with a turn to drawing, after which he attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1956 he moved to New York to study at Cooper Union. By the end of the decade, he was exhibiting within the Judson Gallery circle, known for championing Pop Art, while supporting himself through teaching.

Wesselmann’s early practice developed through collage and assemblage with magazine and billboard imagery, fabric, and household objects. Around 1961 he established two foundational series—Great American Nude and Still Life—that set boldly contoured forms and saturated colour against the vernacular of American consumer culture. He is frequently grouped with Pop Art, though he often resisted the label, framing his aims as formal: composition, colour relationships, and the activation of the picture plane. An early admiration for Matisse and de Kooning informed his attention to contour and chromatic intensity.
Through the mid to late 1960s Wesselmann expanded the scale and format of his work with shaped canvases, relief constructions and the Bedroom Paintings, in which cropped female figures, furniture and appliances create sharply staged interiors. The Smoker and Mouth works, and later beach scenes and seascapes, pursued an equally distilled vocabulary of lips, cigarettes, waves and horizon lines, alternating between painterly passages and flat, commercial surfaces.
From the 1970s he translated his line into three dimensions with cut-metal Steel Drawings and aluminium reliefs, while maintaining a substantial print practice in screenprint and lithography.

Wesselmann’s first solo exhibition took place at Tanager Gallery, New York, in 1961, followed by regular solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Museum exhibitions and retrospectives consolidated his reputation, and his work entered major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate, London. He died in New York in 2004.

Tom Wesselmann