Wesselmann became famous with his "Great American Nude" series, which he continued throughout the 1960s. Wesselmann had touched a nerve. Where it lay was formulated by the director of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Jan van der Marck, at his Wesselmann exhibition in 1968: "Wesselmann shows woman as the consumer, both consuming and being consumed." (Time Magazine U.S., June 14, 1968)
In the present work, Wesselmann shows his model in just this role as "consumer". The lascivious pose in which she presents herself invites us to look at her. This is an extremely intimate picture. The model is not a faceless ideal of our media society, as with the works typical of Wesselmann. Here, the woman is shown in her sexualised individualism, in a moment in which she has become oblivious to the outside world.
