Tom Wesselmann’s recipe for arousal

My first thought on encountering Tom Wesselmann’s two-metre painting of an erect penis is: why are men so obsessed with their dicks? I’m being reductive, but it’s also a question that underpins the Pop artist’s provocative choice of subject as well as the mixed reception to these works which were created between 1967-70, after he’d spent more than a decade depicting naked women. In 1970, the famed critic Peter Schjeldahl described Wesselmann’s pricks as ‘jokey’ in a  New York Times review. Jeffrey Sturges, Wesselmann’s former studio assistant and now director of exhibitions for the artist’s estate, tells me this upset the artist to the point that he wrote about it in his diary. “He couldn’t understand why a penis is considered jokey when a breast isn’t. But I think what he was pointing out was that the review revealed more about Schjeldahl’s response than about the work itself.” 

The painting in front of us is Bedroom Painting 19 (1969), one of several saucy images that comprise ‘Up Close’, a solo presentation of Wesselmann’s work at Almine Rech in London. On the neighbouring wall is its near twin: Bedroom Painting 20 in which an erect penis – this time black and slightly upturned – appears within another carefully staged boudoir. In both, the penis is the protagonist and disruptor, in the sense that it dominates and obscures the view, but oddly, the more you look, the less you see it. Like the alarm clock, smouldering cigarette, red rose or light switch, Wesselmann’s dick becomes another component that makes up the ‘bedroom’ scene. 

Most of the writing about Wesselmann, including the texts commissioned for this exhibition, describes his imagery as erotic but, admits Sturges, this isn’t necessarily the word that the artist himself would have used: “He liked the term sensual.” The two words mean almost the same thing, but Wesselmann’s preference, Sturges suggests, may have had something to do with the common confusion between ‘eroticism’ and ‘pornographic’, the latter referring to content that is explicit rather than suggestive. “Sex was obviously something that was very important to Tom, and it’s present in a lot of the work, but it’s also just the idea of pleasure more broadly.” In other words, the disembodied pricks, boobs, feet and lips along with leopard print rugs, flowers, fags and – less appealingly – boxes of tissues, are part of a kind of recipe for arousal that we’re invited to arrange, according to our particular kinks. (Penises obviously weren’t Schjeldahl’s thing).

Sturges believes that Wesselmann’s choice to title his works as numbered series was part of his attempt to keep the narrative open, to invite us into the work. But as with all art, we can’t get away from the fact that what we’re viewing is not just assembled by the artist, but also filtered through their specific experiences. The pensises, for instance, are apparently all modelled on Wesselmann’s own, while the breasts are based on sketches and photographs he took of his wife and models. These body parts have been smoothed and perfected through the painting process rendering them almost plasticky (except for the occasional puff of pubic hair), but Wesselmann’s choice to work from life – from flesh – rather than pulling images from porn or page three suggests a need for some kind of sensual experience to make the work. Whether we recognise that moment of connection is perhaps beside the point, although Sturges tells me that a woman contacted the estate to say she recognised her own breast in Bedroom Painting 30, a work that also includes a painting of a black and white photograph of Wesselmann’s second wife and muse.

Meanwhile, Self Portrait while Drawing shows Wesselmann himself, pencil in hand, half obscured both by the breasts that he’s depicting and the unusual crop of the composition that is triangular on one side and curved on the other, following the shape of the absent woman’s body. It opens the show at Almine Rech – an interesting choice when this work, to me, is perhaps an even more obvious flex of power (artistic and gendered) than his penises: the artist showing us that he is the one controlling what and how we see. 

Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1931. His university studies in psychology were interrupted by a two-year stint in the army at the end of the Korean War, during which time he began drawing cartoons to entertain himself and his comrades. Upon returning to Cincinnati, he finished his degree before moving to New York to study art at Cooper Union. “That’s when he starts questioning everything in his life which leads to the end of his marriage to his college girlfriend as well as to a period of depression,” says Sturges. “But then he starts going to therapy: he decides he wants to be an artist and he meets a fellow student, Claire Selley, who becomes his girlfriend and who poses for The Great American Nude series [Wesselmann’s best-known work]. It’s like he becomes this new person: he wants to be direct and open about the things that are important to him and one of those things is sex.” 

Despite this sexual and artistic awakening, Sturges remembers Wesselmann as a private man who was insular and exact in his approach to making art. His assistants were employees rather than friends: their job was “geared towards making it easy for him to make work” which would include tasks such as mixing paint, hanging work and general administration. Wesselmann, meanwhile, quietly busied himself with the making of images, while listening to country music and cracking the occasional dry joke, which, I imagine, when Sturges repeats them to me, could have been received somewhat wearily by his staff: “‘The art goes in the second layer of paint,’ he would say, or ‘de-light me’, meaning for us to turn off the lights at the end of the day.”

His sense of humour has a more surreal effect when translated into art. In the Seascape series, monster dicks emerge out of a brilliant blue sky to protrude over a wavering strip of turquoise sea and yellow sand; in Mouth and Tongue, giant red lips hinge open around a pointed pink tongue on blank white canvas. It’s these works that show that Wesselmann’s interest in the body is its form and strangeness as much as its erotic potential. 

As the exhibition tour draws to a close, our conversation is interrupted by a man with wild, wispy hair, wearing a long tweed jacket and a flat cap. It’s Hew Locke, the British-Guyanese artist who, among his many accolades, recently curated an exhibition on British imperial histories at the British Museum. Beaming, he shakes Sturges’s hand: “People forget Wesselmann was just a bloody good painter.”