(Cincinnati 1931–2004 New York)
Smoking Cigarette II (painting), signed and dated Wesselmann 80 on the reverse, acrylic on shaped masonite, 99 x 173 cm, mounted on board and framed

Provenance:
The Estate of the artist
acquired from the above by the present owner in 2008

Exhibited:
New York, New Sculpture and Paintings by Tom Wesselmann, Sidney Janis Gallery, 6 November - 6 December 1980, exh. cat. no. 9 without ill. (label on the reverse)

We are thankful to Brian Kenny, The Wesselmann Estate, New York for confirming the registration of this work.

Tom Wesselmann numbers among the leading figures of the American Pop Art movement of the 1960s. However, he distanced himself from this label, since he focused much more on expressing the visual power of colours and forms than criticizing consumer culture. In 1985 he wrote: “The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art. I think I have succeeded, but there is still a lot further to go.”

Smoking Cigarette #2 displays in a literal sense the concentrate of a piece of life on hold: a burning cigarette with smoke wisping upwards. In keeping with the characteristic style of Wesselmann, it is reproduced at a radically enlarged scale and reduced to the fundamental object on the surface, whereby the distinctive forms are worked out with clear contours and as bright areas of colour.

In Wesselmann’s oeuvre, the smoking cigarette is a recurring and frequently varied motif, which he has deployed in isolation as well as in combination with a perfectly made-up mouth and lasciviously open lips. Contemporary with the present picture, a plastically formed version was made, which counts amongst the first sculptures created by Wesselmann since the late 1970s. As with almost all of Wesselmann’s motifs, the smoking cigarette functions as a blatant symbol of American society. As a gigantically enlarged advertising cliché, it embodies in almost ideal form the contemporary consumer aesthetic. Noteworthy in this regard, however, is the fact that Wesselmann has left out the brand name, in keeping with his practice carried out since 1965, and has thus, not least through this stratagem, imbued the subject with a timeless and emblematic character.

“Everything in Tom Wesselmann’s art is what it is, not more and not less. Even more than most of his Pop Art colleagues, he has devoted himself to, as it goes in a pop song of the 60s, ‘tell it like it is’. (...) Almost exclusively, Wesselmann’s pictures address the pleasure principle in us and, through the conjunction of specific forms, textures and colours, create a specific, interior enjoyment. The choice of motif is only one of the possibilities of the artist, in order to convey feelings of desire up until fulfilled satisfaction. Even if we, like the artist as well, are non-smokers, we can nonetheless understand that a cigarette represents for other people an equally intensive form of oral satisfaction as healthier forms of refreshment.”
Marco Livingstone, “Telling it like it is”, in: Tom Wesselmann 1959-1993, exh.cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, Stuttgart, Ed. Cantz, 1994, page 15