Maverick Mist

Still Life No. 24, 1962
Tom Wesselmann

Pop artist Tom Wesselmann's Still Life No. 24 affirms the American dream and the prosperity of the 1960s middle class. The variety, size and quantity of the fresh, canned and packaged convenience foods give evidence of agricultural abundance, factory productivity, and a thriving consumer economy. Television, with its myriad product advertisements, became a central force of cultural change.

Still Life No. 24 is an assemblage composed of two-dimensional imagery and three-dimensional objects. Wesselmann cut images of foodstuffs and kitchen items from subway posters and other large advertisements. The plastic ear of corn is an advertising prop, acquired by the artist from a vendor on Coney Island who sold corn on the cob.

The blue curtain is of the type pictured in magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, which promoted interior design to the middle class. Through the window, a sailboat glides along, further suggesting the good life of the American dream.

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