Tom Wesselmann

An American born painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1931. He studied psychology at the University of Cincinnati and also took art classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Originally he had intended to become a cartoonist, but instead turned to painting.

From 1956 to 1959, he continued his art studies at the Cooper Union in New York. He claimed to have heard only of one living artist, the painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, at the time of his arrival in New York, but he quickly informed himself about modern art by visiting the museums where the works of Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning made a lasting impact on him.

In 1961, he had his first one-man show in New York, and soon after emerged as one of the leading figures in American Pop Art, exhibiting alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Alex Katz, among others. Wesselmann never liked his inclusion in American Pop Art, pointing out how he made an aesthetic use of everyday objects and not a reference to them as consumer objects. He would often incorporate elements of collage or assemblage in his work, using everyday objects such as television sets, telephones and even included sound effects.

Wesselmann's subjects are characteristically overtly sexual, and he is best known for his continuing painting series the Great American Nude, begun in 1961, where the nude becomes a depersonalized sex symbol set in a commonplace environment. He emphasized the woman's nipples, mouth and genitals with the rest of the body depicted in flat, unmodulated colour.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wesselmann worked constantly on the Bedroom Painting Series in which elements of his Great American Nude, Still Lifes and Seascapes were juxtaposed.  With these works Wesselmann began to concentrate on a few details, such as hands, feet and breasts, surrounded by flowers and objects. A major motivation of the Bedroom Paintings was to shift the focus and scale of the attendant objects around a nude. These objects are relatively small in relation to the nude, but become major, even dominant elements when the central element is a body part.

Wesselmann was a highly inventive printmaker who favored the screen print (serigraph), but also worked in unconventional formats, such as blind embossing and mixograph relief prints. These large scale prints mirror the boldness of his unique paintings and embody the vitality, openness and free spirit of the sixties.