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Gagosian Tries to Jump Start Wesselmann Market with Still Lifes

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The Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow plugs Gagosian’s show of Tom Wesselmann’s large, late still lifes:

The gallery has gathered nine still lifes that the artist created between 1967 and 1981 but never showed together. MoMA lent one ofthe pieces from 1969-70, “Still Life #57,” but most of the others went unsold when they were initially shown and have remained in the artist’s estate.

Gagosian declined to say what it plans to ask for the still lifes in its show, but … a smaller, preparatory painting for one of the … pieces on view at Gagosian, 1981’s “Still Life with Belt and Sneaker,” sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for $650,500.

A smaller, single-panel work from 1981, Still Life and Blue Jar and Smoking Cigarette, sold at Phillips in May 2015 for $1.385m which gives those interested a better sense of the pricing for these works.

Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann’s Larger-Than-Life Paintings Go On View  (WSJ)

Do Wesselmann’s Nudes Keep His Prices Down?

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Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude, Floral Blanket

For a while there, it looked like Tom Wesselmann was going to break out on the art market as pop works by Lichtenstein and Warhol drove interest in first-rank second tier painters like Wesselmann. But that momentum stalled out with the peak of the last market cycle in 2007-2008.

Since that time (8 out of his top ten prices, including the $10m record price, were made during the ’07-08 period,) two of Wesselmann’s works have sold for $3m or $4m. Sotheby’s hit the $4m mark again in New York in May but failed to follow up with a similar work estimated in the same range that stalled on the block in London in June.

National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to look at the Wesselmann retrospective organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Wesselmann estate. Her response to the artist’s work suggests that Wesselmann may just be too tough to domesticate:

“I don’t think you could ask for a more literal interpretation of the objectification of parts of the female body,” says curator Sarah Eckhardt. […]

Now, in 2013, Wesselmann’s tastes seem insulting to feminist eyes — seeing women only as sex objects. But curator Sarah Eckhardt says in the pre-feminist ’60s (those Playboy and pinup days) women were objectified that way. And if these paintings shock us today, that’s part of a long artistic tradition.

“If there’s something to resist in Wesselmann, it’s something that could be resisted in almost any of the nudes in art history,” Eckhardt says.

In fine art, the female body is a nude. In not-so-fine art, she’s naked.

Naked Or Nude? Wesselmann’s Models Are A Little Bit Of Both (National Public Radio)

The Heat of Pop

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Deborah Solomon had a broad book review in the New York Times that spanned James Rosenquist to Andy Warhol in an attempt to cover the books and say something interesting about Pop art which has been on a multi-year tear both critically and on the art market. As the genre reaches a new position in art history, Solomon’s take is both witty and insightful:

“F-111” (1964-65), is an epic, multi-panel painting in which the sleek fuselage of a fighter bomber nose-dives into disparate images of an angel food cake, a Firestone tire and a mound of canned-style spaghetti. For all its jokey references, the painting is a powerful deconstruction of the American dream, questioning the connection between affluence and war. It ought to be obvious by now that there is more creative heat in Rosenquist’s “F-111” than in countless Abstract Expressionist paintings that were hyped in their time as marvels of raw emotion, if only because they offered improvised-looking drips and splashes in place of the patient description of the real world. […]

Pop Art, in the meantime, continues to offer up new meaning to a new generation. What originally was interpreted as an Ab Ex backlash — a process of subtraction and extraction that took the drip out of art, the tactility out of art and even, according to Danto, the artistry out of art — now seems more like a knowing wink at the American future. Why does Pop Art continue to speak to us so forcefully?Continue Reading

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