Tom Wesselmann

Tom Wesselmann

(American, 1931-2004)

A leading figure of American Pop, Tom Wesselmann reimagined the languages of the nude, the still life, and the landscape through bold contour, saturated color, and the graphic clarity of commercial imagery. Trained at Cooper Union, he emerged in early-1960s New York with the landmark series Great American Nude and the billboard-scale Still Lifes, translating collage strategies into shaped canvases and high-impact pictorial icons. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he expanded these concerns in Smokers, Seascapes, and Bedroom Paintings, paring motifs to essentials while heightening sensual charge and immediacy. In later decades Wesselmann pursued large “steel drawings” and laser-cut aluminum works that extended his line into sculptural space, alongside a prolific print practice that distilled his imagery with exceptional precision. Widely exhibited and collected, his oeuvre maps a consistent investigation of desire, display, and the aesthetics of postwar American consumer culture—at once direct, witty, and rigorously composed.