Study for Vivienne 1985

Tom Wesselmann made this "Study for Vivienne" with paint. I’m picturing him, brush in hand, mapping out this face in a tangle of lines. There’s something so immediate about the marks, the juicy reds and blacks, set against the pale ground. The colors don’t quite fit into their lines. You know, that yellow squiggle almost feels separate, like a doodle floating in space. And those lips! They’re so declarative, so perfectly pop. I can imagine Wesselmann thinking about Matisse, about the way line can define form, but also break it apart. He's in conversation with artists, past and present, who are thinking about these same things, the tension between abstraction and representation. It's cool how a painting becomes a site for inquiry for both the artist and us, the viewers.