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Artist or Maker: Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004)

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Provenance: Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Robert Abrams, New York, 1974
Acquired from the above by the present owner

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Exhibited: New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, New Paintings by Wesselmann, April-May 1974 (illustrated).
Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art; Sapporo, Museum of Contemporary Art; Shiga, The Museum of Modern Art and Kinetsu, Museum of Art, Tom Wesselmann: A Retrospective Survey 1959-1992, 1993.
Ostfildern, Intstitut für Kunsturaustausch; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts; Berlin, Altes Museum; Munich, Museum Villa Stuck; Rotterdam, Kunsthal; Speyer, Historisches Museum der Pfalz; Paris, Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain; Madrid, Fundacion Juan March; Barcelona, Palais de la Virreina; Lisbon, Culturgest; Nice, Musée de l'Art Moderne; Frankfurt, Nikolaus Fischer Gallery; Seoul, Gana Art Gallery; Paris, Didier Imbert Fine Art and Munich, Galerie Beatrice Wassermann, Tom Wesselmann: A Retrospective 1959-1993, 1994.

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Literature: S. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 67 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: Property Formerly in the Abrams Family Collection

In Smoker #9, painted in 1973, smoke drifts lazily from a languidly open, luscious, red-lipped mouth. Tom Wesselmann introduces the viewer to a world of screen goddesses and femmes fatales. The picture, on its specially shaped, larger-than-life canvas, concentrates on a limited number of objects: mouth, cigarette, hand, smoke. Wesselmann decontextualizes the motif in a Surreal, almost Magrittean way, subjecting it to an absurd, witty focus. Isolated on the wall, these elements are deprived even of a background, the shape of the canvas providing an emphatic boundary between the world of the picture and the world around it.

Wesselmann had begun painting his Smokers in 1967. Along with the Great American Nudes, they were to become one of his most celebrated themes. At the time he began the series, he had been drawing studies of his friend Peggy Sarno for his Mouth series. When she took a cigarette break, Wesselmann was suddenly fascinated by the extra strength and complexity that the image gained when the wisps of curling smoke -- a formal device that recalls Léger's Contraste des formes pictures from the beginning of the century -- was added. Wesselmann's series was revitalized in 1973, the year that Smoker #9 was painted, by a new visual addition. He himself explained this new change, writing under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth:

"A major addition to his imagery occurred in 1973. Wesselmann had considered the Smoker series finished when he suddenly thought to include the hand. This greatly enhanced the complexity of the image and renewed his excitement. This excitement pushed him to increase the scale sharply. The mouth was the smallest part of the body he had focused on, and now... it became the biggest in size. This huge scale transformed the situation from the depiction of a human activity into an immediately overwhelming and beautiful confrontation with an impossibly monumental phenomenon" (T. Wesselmann, as Slim Stealingworth, quoted in Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 66).

In these works Wesselmann truly achieved the new and striking sense of scale that would inform so many of his works during the rest of his career. The vast spread of shaped canvas here adopted as his support reinforces the Surreal quality of this highly-cropped image. It also enters, despite Wesselmann's protestations to the contrary, the realm of the modern monumental image -- the billboard. The striking visual impact of pictures such as Smoker #9, combined with their celebration of the seemingly banal has caused Wesselmann's work to be seen as dovetailing with that of New York Pop artists working at the same time.

Wesselmann always maintained some distance from the Pop artists, despite acknowledging various overlaps of the subjects and look of his paintings. His interests were more figurative and formal, and less concerned with consumerism or mass media. While he was willing to adopt some of the heightened, intense wall power of Pop and advertizing, he did it in a way that celebrated human activity and the human body, albeit through the visual language of the absurd. That he chose subject matter for its more formal qualities was emphasized by the fact that Wesselmann himself was not a smoker, as he was at pains to point out: "That it has to do with the smoking of a cigarette has little bearing on the work or its intent. Wesselmann does not smoke. (He was a moderate to light smoker until the first cancer reports came out, at which time he immediately threw out all cigarettes, and hasn't smoked since)" (T. Wesselmann, quoted in ibid., p. 66).

To give this vast focus on one human activity, on one human mouth and hand, all the more visual impact, to justify this intense zoom on cigarette, smoke and lips, Wesselmann realized that he needed to imbue the few elements he included with a new sense of verisimilitude. Accordingly, in the large Smokers such as this painting, "for the first time to any real extent, Wesselmann worked with photographs."

As he explained, "Drawing the smoke from life was nearly impossible, so he worked with photographs of a friend, Danièle, smoking. Working directly from the photographs, he then made many oil studies. He generally made up his own simplified smoke, taking cues from the photographs. In drawing the hand and the mouth he relied heavily on the photographs. These photographs started the best of the Smoker paintings, such as Smoker #8 and Smoker #9. Wesselmann moved more into realistic details in the hand -- still very restrained, but a significant move in relation to his more typical flat skins... In an unreal situation such as an isolated mouth, he felt that the more realistic hand helps set up a more convincing reality" (T. Wesselmann, quoted in ibid., p. 68).

Intriguingly, this recourse to photographic sources brought about new challenges: "Many changes had to be made in the photographic images. When isolated, the photo mouth seemed tiny in relation to a hand. The mouths had to be as much as doubled in size to be right for the painting." This, and Danièle's graceful hands, imbued pictures such as Smoker #9 with an eroticism and sensuality that the artist himself had not originally intended but that, as Smoker #9 amply demonstrates, he willingly embraced. Wesselmann claimed that in his pictures sex is sex, and is shown as sex, whereas smoking is smoking. However, in part through its association with his other pictures and in part because of the elegant, manicured fingers and the vast, coaxingly open mouth, Smoker #9 invokes a world of post-coital cigarettes or Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. And this makes Smoker #9 all the more seductive an image, recalling the most successful advertizements as well as the most beautiful starlets in films noirs. Wesselmann was conscious of this drift away from his original intentions, explaining, in the guise of Slim Stealingworth, how this development had its source in something incredibly simple: his model's hands. "In the Smoker project Wesselmann first used a friend with wonderfully 'real' hands," he recounted. "He wanted to avoid a sense of similarity to glamour nail polish ads; and these hands were girlishly, peasantly chubby with bitten fingernails. Danièle's hands, which were slender with long polished nails, were irresistibly beautiful, and Wesselmann could not resist them. So almost all of his smokers have these glamourous hands" (T. Wesselmann, quoted in ibid., p. 68).

24416122: Wesselman, Drawing from Smoker #9, 1974. (c)Estate of Tom Wesselman.

26014289: Installation view of "The Wesselmann", Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris 1994 (present lot illustrated).