About
The prime mission of my art . . . is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art.
—Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004) was one of the leading American Pop artists of the 1960s. Departing from Abstract Expressionism, he explored classical representations of the nude, still life, and landscape, while incorporating everyday objects and advertising ephemera.
Wesselmann was drafted into the US Army in 1952, two years into the Korean War. During his military service, he learned—then taught—aerial photography interpretation, and began to draw cartoons about his experiences. Upon his return to his hometown of Cincinnati, he completed a BA in psychology at the University of Cincinnati and began taking classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In fall 1956, he moved to New York City to study art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where the artist Nicholas Marsicano was one of his instructors. At Cooper Union, he met Claire Selley, who would become his wife and lifelong muse. Wesselmann’s early drawings of Selley often took the form of hybrid collages, incorporating sketches, scraps of wallpaper, and found advertisements. Similarly, his early assemblage paintings, which include functioning objects and gadgets, present shifting images that advance and retreat depending on the viewer’s relative position.
Living in Brooklyn, Wesselmann supported himself by selling cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post, “gag” magazines, and advertising agencies. In the late 1950s, he cofounded the Judson Gallery in the West Village with Marc Ratliff and Jim Dine. After completing his studies at Cooper Union, Wesselmann spent three years teaching high school art and math. During the evening, he continued to expand his own artistic practice, making small portrait collages, such as his groundbreaking Portrait Collage #1 (1959). Wesselmann recalled: “I wanted my painting to be spatially and visually aggressive like de Kooning. But in order to be myself, I knew I had to forget de Kooning, just as he got around Picasso.”
Wesselmann is highly regarded for his Great American Nude series (1961–73), which combines sensual depictions of the female figure with references to art history and popular culture. Many of these lounging female subjects were painted in patriotic red, white, and blue, quoting the Western figurative tradition while incorporating elements of high voltage American advertising. In the late 1960s Wesselmann created close-up views of the nude in the Bedroom Paintings (1968–83). In these works a single part of the body, such as a hand or a breast, is juxtaposed with objects common to the bedroom—a light switch, flowers, the edges of pillows, and curtains.
From 1967 through 1981 Wesselmann worked on his Standing Still Life paintings, monumental works comprising multiple canvases shaped according to the outline of the commonplace objects that they depict; in 2018 the complete series of nine works was exhibited for the first time at Gagosian on West 24th Street, New York. After the Standing Still Lifes, Wesselmann continued to make three-dimensional sculptural work. He also developed an innovative technique of “drawing” with sculptural materials, cutting steel and aluminum in the shape of his drawn forms. His abstract works of the mid-1990s, through the early 2000s expanded this mode of working on a larger scale, and continued to push the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Photo: © Jack Mitchell
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Exhibitions
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.
“Tight and Small and Figurative”: Tom Wesselmann’s Early Collages
Susan Davidson, editor of the forthcoming monograph on the Great American Nudes, a series of works by Tom Wesselmann, explores the artist’s early experiments with collage, tracing their development from humble beginnings to the iconic series of paintings.
In Conversation
Susan Davidson and Jeffrey Sturges
On the occasion of the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: Intimate Spaces at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, Susan Davidson sat down with Jeffrey Sturges to discuss the artist’s key works in his Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series.
The Parameters of Perception
Michael Craig-Martin and Jeffrey Sturges in conversation on Tom Wessselmann’s Standing Still Lifes.
Richard Phillips on Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann: Standing Still Lifes closes this week at Gagosian New York. In this text, Richard Phillips speaks with Jason Ysenburg about the impact of the exhibition. A video about the exhibition and the artist’s studio practice accompanies the text.
Tom Wesselmann: In the Studio
Join us for a look at Tom Wesselmann’s New York studio in this behind-the-scenes video. Featuring archival footage of Wesselmann at work, as well as new interviews with his family, studio team, and friends, the film documents the creative process behind his large-scale works, from early still lifes to later abstractions.
Spotlight
Tom Wesselmann
The story behind Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #59 (1972). Text by Lauren Mahony.
Reinventing the Nude
Modern master Henri Matisse was a touchstone for American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann throughout his career.
Book Corner
One-Cent Life
A 1964 publication by the Chinese-American artist and poet Walasse Ting and Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Talk
Rachel Middleman
Erotic Art and Feminism in the 1960s
Thursday, June 22, 2023, 1pm EDT
Rachel Middleman, associate professor of art history at California State University, Chico, will give a lecture as part of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s webinar series Between the Two: Art and Sexuality in 1960s New York. She will explore the broad category of “erotic art” in exhibitions of the decade, discussing Pop artists including Tom Wesselmann, and consider the ways in which women artists, among them Martha Edelheit and Marjorie Strider, sought to reshape the conventions of “the nude” and upend the presumed objectivity of formalism of erotic art.
Tom Wesselmann, Female smoker with outlined knuckles, c. 1975, Tom Wesselmann Papers, The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.
Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
December 1–3, 2022, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Returning to Miami for the fair’s twentieth anniversary, the gallery is honored to have participated each year the fair has been held.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Gerhard Richter; © Amoako Boafo; © Richard Prince; © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Talk
Two Men from Cincinnati
Tom Wesselmann’s 1962 Debut at the Green Gallery with Susan Davidson
Tuesday, October 4, 2022, 1pm EdT
As part of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s webinar series Pop Places 1958–1966, curator and art historian Susan Davidson will discuss research from her upcoming monograph devoted to the stylistic development and reception of Tom Wesselmann’s most famous body of work, the Great American Nude series (1961–69/73), many of which were shown at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962. Each of these midday talks is dedicated to a different key New York exhibition space of the Pop era from an array of sites where artists, gallerists, and critics collectively worked through and developed the forms, ideas, and challenges that would later become identified with the Pop art movement.
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #34, 1962 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York
Museum Exhibitions
On View
The Whitney’s Collection
Selections from 1900 to 1965
Opened June 28, 2019
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
This exhibition of more than 120 works, drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, is inspired by the founding history of the museum. The Whitney was established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to champion the work of living American artists. A sculptor and a patron, Whitney recognized both the importance of contemporary American art and the need to support the artists who made it. The collection she assembled foregrounds how artists uniquely reveal the complexity and beauty of American life. Work by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann is included.
Installation view, The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 28, 2019–May 2022. Artwork, left to right: © 2020 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Norman Lewis; © 2020 The Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz
Closed
El eco de Picasso
October 2, 2023–March 30, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
museopicassomalaga.org
Organized as part of Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, a series of international exhibitions and events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, The Echo of Picasso focuses on his influence on twentieth-century art. The exhibition places Picasso’s practice in dialogue with work by more than fifty artists, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Thomas Houseago, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, and Franz West.
Installation view, El eco de Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, October 2, 2023–March 30, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Rebecca Warren, © Richard Prince. Photo: Pablo Asenjo, courtesy Museo Picasso Málaga
Closed
Order / Reorder
Experiments with Collections
June 17, 2022–September 3, 2023
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
www.hrm.org
Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections examines ways to look at American art that consider expressions of American identity from new perspectives. The works on view range across genres: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape, and abstraction. Rather than following a chronological structure, the installation aims to spark discussion through juxtaposing styles, outlooks, and eras. Work by Derrick Adams and Tom Wesselmann is included.
Derrick Adams, Self-Portrait on Float, 2019, Hudson River Museum © Derrick Adams Studio/Tandem Press, Madison, Wisconsin
Closed
Tom Wesselmann
After Matisse
February 24–May 29, 2023
Musée Matisse, Nice, France
www.musee-matisse-nice.org
This exhibition explores the many ways in which Tom Wesselmann expressed his admiration for Henri Matisse over the course of his career, from his first collages in 1959 to his last paintings, the Sunset Nudes series of the 2000s. Through a selection of forty-one works, the show investigates Wesselmann’s creative processes in the studio and brings together four significant series that testify to Matisse’s influence on the Pop artist: collages, Great American Nudes, Steel Drawings, and Sunset Nudes.
Tom Wesselmann, Man Ray at the Dance, 2004 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York. Photo: © Jeffrey Sturges