Tom Wesselmann

Best known for his career-spanning series Great American Nude, featuring female figures in intensely saturated interiors, Pop artist Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004) used collage, assemblage and shaped canvases to usher in a new vocabulary of painting. The works in this catalogue highlight a number of techniques that Wesselmann pioneered and are largely not to be found among his Pop contemporaries. In an interior still life from 1964, Wesselmann incorporates a fan and a clock into the canvas, pushing the boundaries of collage and assemblage. Collages from the 1960s feature cutouts from advertising billboards.
Also included are Wesselmann’s steel-cut works, molded plastic paintings and his iconic shaped canvases. A large-scale painting installation is featured, underscoring Wesselmann’s highly innovative approach in bringing the medium into three dimensions. From his Great American Nude of 1961 to his final Sunset Nude of 2004, the full breadth of Wesselmann’s accomplishment is represented.

Tom Wesselmann was born in 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio. As an art student at New York's Cooper Union, Wesselman was a devotee of the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Realizing that Ab Ex had already been taken to its apex, Wesselman turned far away, to the artifacts of the everyday world, to Pop. He lives in New York.

Michael Lobel is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the M.A. Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism, and Theory at Purchase College, State University of New York.