Still Life #12
- Image
- View Full Item
- Created Date
- 1962
- Description
In Still Life #12, Wesselmann attached commercial images of frosty beverages and freshly cooked food to a painted facsimile of a red-checked tablecloth. A window in the background turns out to be a photograph of an orchard, with two cutout areas colored to resemble photographs of a lemon and an apple. For these painted elements, the artist heated up the already intense colors of advertisements to create what he called an "aggressive" picture. Two bottles of Coca Cola, painted on stamped metal, push outward from the surface, complicating our sense of what is real and what is invented. Wesselmann's luscious images of food and drink point to another kind of desire. The apple and the breast-shaped lemon perch on the threshold of the Garden of Eden, while, below, a glistening, trussed ham and two strategically placed cans of "Bustelo" coffee stand in for one of the Great American Nudes that made Wesselmann the bad boy of American art. Wesselmann enjoyed the publicity that the pop artist label brought him, but he insisted that his collages expressed something more important than consumer culture. Still Life #12 recasts old traditions of the nude, the still life, and landscape painting in the hip language of modern American life.Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
- Creator
- Tom Wesselmann, born Cincinnati, OH 1931-died New York City 2004
- Partner
- Smithsonian Institution
- Contributing Institution
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Subjects
- Still life
Other
Cookware
Camera
Meat
Foodstuff
Foodstuff
Beverage
Container
Meat
Art tool
Fruit
Fruit
Lemon
Lemon
Cookware
Wesselmann, Tom
Beverage
Container
Apple
Art tool
Camera
Apple - Type
- image
- Format
- Acrylic and collage of fabric, photogravure, metal, etc. on fiberboard
- Rights
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase
- Chicago citation style
- Tom Wesselmann, born Cincinnati, OH 1931-died New York City 2004. Still Life #12. 1962. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=record_ID%3Asaam_1986.23&repo=DPLA. (Accessed February 18, 2019.)
- APA citation style
- Tom Wesselmann, born Cincinnati, OH 1931-died New York City 2004, (1962) Still Life #12. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=record_ID%3Asaam_1986.23&repo=DPLA
- MLA citation style
- Tom Wesselmann, born Cincinnati, OH 1931-died New York City 2004. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America <http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=record_ID%3Asaam_1986.23&repo=DPLA>.