Page 30 - Studio International - May 1966

tor walking round these objects in all their sinister crudity This deliberately disconcerting illusionism is undoubted-
and eroticism is very close to Surrealist shocks, whether ly Surrealist, finding its source in proto-Surrealist works
intended by the artist or not. by Duchamp about 1920, such as his white-painted
Encroachment on surrounding space is seen in a different wooden french window with glass panes set in imitation
way in Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nude series. A brickwork. Some of Wesselmann's nude series are set in
typical example shows a painted nude on a painted bathrooms, and other paintings by him show kitchen
orange bed above which is stuck a reproduction of a scenes incorporating collaged tin and bottle labels. He
Matisse still-life. Beside the woman is a real window- has said rather revealingly about his inspiration that:
frame and real Venetian blind through which one sees a `Billboards, bathrooms and kitchens did not particularly
view which is a colour photograph from a travel poster; excite me until I realized that they had a kind of super-
below, a real radiator, a real bedside table with a pot of reality that could be exploited in painting. The real
plastic tulips on it, all of which stand on a genuine red refrigerator in my kitchen does not excite me especially,
carpet. The combination of real objects, plastic imitations but a refrigerator door that I can hold in my hands and
of real objects, photographs of real objects, a reproduction walk around with and put into a painting does excite me.
of a painting of real objects, and pure painting is extreme- Billboards and commercial displays provide materials of
ly disconcerting in its union of all kinds of 'reality'. extravagant quality and size, and I try to capitalize on
this aspect in a particular painting.'
Near the centre of Rauschenberg's long Barge appear
Konrad Klapheck three images placed one above the other: a lorry,
The Egoist 1964 Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, and a fly-over road junction.
Oil
40 1/2 x 54 1/2 in. Venus's naked curves are echoed in both lorry and fly-
over. Such startling juxtapositions involving the female
nude are a good illustration of the sexual ingredient so
crucial to Surrealism, which emerges in some Pop art,
including Happenings, sometimes involving pure Sur-
realist erotic symbolism. To nudes already mentioned in
brothels, baths, Happenings or the Old Masters should
be added the vulgar, suggestively-nude luscious females
on the canvases of Mel Ramos. A recent example shows
a blonde gazing straight out at the spectator as she plays
with her necklace, cross-legged on an overlifesize ham-
burger. The repeatedly suggestive use of the nude in