Art: Still Life

Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nudes have long been a fixture of the gallery and museum scene. These chromatic cuties—or selected parts of their anatomy—are usually molded in plastic or painted in hot, bright oils and acrylics, but the current show at New York's Sidney Janis Gallery features the breast of a real live girl. The work, a three-dimensional still life, is contained in a box firmly set into a tightly closed door. Every Saturday between 2 and 4:30 p.m. the breast projects from a hole in the top amongst the painted wooden models of an orange, an ashtray and a bottle of perfume—all in scale. The rest of the girl is lying on a foam-rubber-covered scaffolding, safely out of sight and usually reading a book for her graduate studies in political science at Columbia University.