Tom Wesselmann, 73, Pop Artist
Hyfler/Rosner
Tom Wesselmann, 73, Pop Artist Known for Sleek Nudes, Is
Dead
By ROBERTA SMITH NY Times
There are nudes here. You just have to look for them.
http://www.imageandart.com/tutoriales/biografias/wesselmann/wesselmann.html
http://karaart.com/wesselmann/wesselmann-tom-07.jpg
http://www-pub.naz.edu:9000/~seisen6/web%20book/pages/s-TOM%20WESSELMANN%20PAGES%202.htm
Tom Wesselmann, a prominent Pop artist best known for
modernizing the classic female nude into a flat, enigmatic,
billboard-friendly silhouette, died Friday at New York
University Medical Center. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications after heart surgery, said his
wife, Claire Wesselmann.
Along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg,
James Rosenquist and Jim Dine, Mr. Wesselmann belonged to a
generation of artists who gave American art and culture a
new sense of itself. They found inspiration, source
materials and even working methods in areas beyond art - in
advertising, movies, food labels, household appliances,
newspaper front pages and in commercial art techniques like
silkscreen, Benday dots and billboard painting. The changes
they wrought continue to reverberate through contemporary
art and life.
Mr. Wesselmann's sleek, hard-edge, mostly pink silhouettes
of reclining female torsos or big cutout lips exhaling
clouds of cigarette smoke were distinguished from his fellow
Pop artists by a sensuous heat and close-up intimacy that
were one part sex and four parts astutely considered color
and scale. The images were distant relatives of pinups,
filtered through the billboard genre but with a formal
infrastructure developed from careful attention to the
paintings of de Kooning, Matisse and Mondrian. His goal was
an image that was "aggressive," as he once put it, and that
he experienced for the first time at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1958 in front of a large canvas by the Abstract
Expressionist Robert Motherwell.
In his third-person autobiographical account of his
development, "Tom Wesselmann," published in 1980 by Harry N.
Abrams, the pseudonymous Slim Stealingworth wrote of Mr.
Wesselmann that "he felt a sensation of high visceral
excitement in his stomach, and it seemed as though his eyes
and stomach were directly connected."
"Throughout the early half of the 60's he used this same
feeling to determine the completion of his own paintings,"
the account continued. "In later years, he somewhat lost the
specific ability to experience this clearly although he
often relied on it to some lesser degree."
Born in Cincinnati in 1931, Mr. Wesselmann had no interest
in art until he was in his 20's. During the Korean War, he
was drafted into the Army from college. Resenting the
disruption, he redirected an interest in humor into
cartooning. Sent to Fort Riley, Kan., to train in aerial
photography interpretation, he set about teaching himself to
draw.
After the Army, he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
At a teacher's suggestion, he moved to New York in 1956,
applied to the tuition-free Cooper Union School of the Arts
and was accepted.
He supported himself by selling cartoons to magazines, but
gradually shifted his focus to the fine arts, at a point
when their fineness was being actively questioned. By the
late 1950's, he was making large collages from magazine
clippings and more rugged materials like cardboard boxes and
movie posters scavenged from the streets and subways. But
his touchstones were Bonnard's and Matisse's interior images
of female nudes, and he soon started calling his own
versions Great American Nudes.
In 1961, Mr. Wesselmann met Henry Geldzahler, a curator at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while they were
participating in one of Mr. Oldenburg's happenings. Mr.
Geldzahler looked at his work and recommended it to the
painter Alex Katz, who offered Mr. Wesselmann a show at the
Tanager Gallery, one of the artists' co-ops on East 10th
Street, the center of the Abstract Expressionist painting
scene.
His show there, held at the end of 1961, was one of the
first signs of an aesthetic shift that would be more sharply
defined in the early months of 1962, with solo shows by Mr.
Rosenquist at the Green Gallery and by Lichtenstein and
Warhol at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Mr. Wesselmann had his
next three solo shows at the Green Gallery. After it closed,
he joined the Sidney Janis Gallery, whose New Realists
exhibition in October 1962 made Pop Art official.
In the 1960's, Mr. Wesselmann expanded on his collages in
still lifes and interiors-with-nudes that often combined
painted images with real objects, including radios,
television sets, refrigerator doors and bathroom fixtures.
Perhaps under the influence of other Pop artists, he
deliberately eliminated any sign of the painter's hand,
preferring the more hard-edged commercial art look. In his
"Smokers" series of the 1970's, he zeroed in on the female
nude with a series of enormous cutout details: ruby-red
lips, manicured fingernails and cigarettes.
As time progressed, Mr. Wesselmann sometimes seemed less
like an instigator than an extremely adept follower of Pop
Art indebted to Mr. Rosenquist, or more tangential artists
like Mr. Katz or John Wesley. But the heat and flatness of
his color, the shallowness of his compositions, the suave
paint handling and the presence or intimation of the female
nude remained indelible signatures.
Always highly productive, he experimented with materials and
techniques and even ventured into sculpture. His
considerable gifts as a draftsman were scaled up in a series
of landscapes and nudes made of painted, cutout aluminum, a
material also employed in abstract reliefs that paid homage
to de Kooning. At the time of his death, he was working on a
series of nudes painted in an Abstract Expressionist style.
Mr. Wesselmann's most recent New York gallery exhibition was
at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea in 2003.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters,
Kate Wesselmann and Jenny Wesselmann, and a son, Lane, all
of New York.
Hyfler/Rosner
22 December 2004
Tom Wesselmann, painter, printmaker and sculptor: born
Cincinnati, Ohio 23 February 1931; married first Dot Irish
(marriage dissolved), second 1963 Claire Selley (one son,
two daughters); died New York 17 December 2004.
Tom Wesselmann was one of a remarkable group of artists, all
destined to be pioneers of the Pop Art movement, who spent
their formative years in the half-industrial,
half-agricultural midwestern state of Ohio.
The oldest, Roy Lichtenstein, was born in New York in 1923
but moved at the age of 16 to Columbus, Ohio, to train as an
artist, later painting in Cleveland from 1951 to 1957; R.B.
Kitaj was born in 1932 in Columbus, where he remained until
1941; and Jim Dine was born in 1935, four years after
Wesselmann, in the same city, Cincinnati, on the Kentucky
border. Perhaps it was the state's remarkable museums that
encouraged its native talent to blossom, or maybe it was
just chance: for Wesselmann, in fact, the route into art was
a far from conventional one. It was not until he was well
into his twenties that he considered becoming a painter.
Wesselmann studied at Hiram College in Ohio from 1949 to
1951, before entering the University of Cincinnati in 1951
to study Psychology. A year later, he was forced to
interrupt his studies when he was drafted into the US Army.
He married for the first time during his two years of
service and, to express his irritation at army life, began
creating humorous cartoons through which he discovered his
ability to draw and to express himself through visual means.
When he completed his stint in the army, he returned to
Cincinnati to complete his psychology degree and, for the
first time, began taking art courses at the Art Academy of
Cincinnati. On deciding that he wanted to make a career as a
cartoonist, he followed a tutor's advice to enrol at the
Cooper Union in New York, both because no tuition fees were
charged there and because of the many opportunities offered
by New York-based magazines to publish cartoons. From autumn
1956 to summer 1959 Wesselmann took a wide range of courses
at the Cooper Union, including life drawing, a practice that
was soon to serve him so well in the creation of his "Great
American Nude" series that he instigated in 1961.
Wesselmann 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 downtown galleries. By the
time of his graduation, he had decided to devote himself not
to cartooning but to painting. Yet his graphic flair and
fluency in drawing, his devotion to the human figure, a dry
sense of humour and his ease at communicating with the
general public through his imagery were all to prove
important factors in his particular brand of Pop Art.
In 1959 Wesselmann made the first of a series of tiny
collages in which he established some of the methods and
imagery of his mature art. Using motifs cut out from
magazines alongside pieces of cloth and other found
materials, and completing these with hand-drawn elements, he
devised engaging vignettes of domestic life centring on the
theme of the nude in the interior.
Although these were firmly grounded in long-standing
European traditions, it was in these works that he first
proposed the possibility of reflecting the immediacy of his
own environment. Since all the talk in literary circles at
the time was centred on the challenge of escaping European
influences and of creating the Great American Novel,
Wesselmann - with tongue only slightly in his cheek -
greatly expanded his scale in 1961 for the first of many
"Great American Nudes".
Mixing references to modern masters such as Matisse,
Mondrian and Modigliani with blatantly prosaic details from
contemporary American life, such as television, advertising,
consumer products and fast food, he created a highly
original hybrid form of painting and collage that brought
him immediate attention and art- world success. His work was
included in a number of the groundbreaking Pop Art
exhibitions of 1962-63, including "New Realists" at the
Sidney Janis Gallery and "The Popular Image" at the
Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
Wesselmann's work of the 1960s - sexy, visually bold and
brightly coloured, unpretentious and deeply mistrustful of
theory - was quickly prized by collectors. If it was taken
to the collective bosom of the general public, however, the
ample bosoms that were such a striking feature of his
pictures soon brought him criticism, too, from the nascent
feminist movement, even though he felt strongly that he was
celebrating sexuality rather than objectifying women.
Resolutely working-class and suspicious of intellectualising
what for him was an intuitive activity, Wesselmann soon
found himself becoming marginalised and even excluded from
historical accounts of the period and even of the movement
he helped shape. As recently as 1992, when he was left out
of a museum survey exhibition called "Hand-painted Pop", he
has been shamelessly sidelined by writers and curators who
were either perplexed or embarrassed by the earthiness and
blunt-speaking qualities of Wesselmann's art.
It shocks me still, given the many museum shows that have
been accorded to his American Pop colleagues, that the only
retrospective yet accorded to his paintings was the one I
organised in Japan in 1993, which afterwards toured Europe
in expanded form.
It did not help Wesselmann's position that he was so
reluctant to play the expected games. He lived for some 35
years in the same relatively modest Lower Manhattan
apartment, from where he walked six days a week to the vast
studio where he put in long hours, stopping only briefly for
his lunch of vegetarian hot dogs, popcorn, juice and
seltzer.
He exhibited at the highly prestigious Sidney Janis Gallery
from 1966 through to its closure three decades later, but
made little effort to be seen at the glamorous art-world
events where contacts are made and deals struck. He wrote
about his work with a straightforward intelligence under the
pseudonym Slim Stealingworth, even publishing a major
monograph with that byline in 1980, but was shy and
reluctant to appear on public panels or to pontificate about
his art.
He spoke and behaved as he must always have done, never
exchanging the denim shirt and jeans of his blue-collar
origins for the designer suits of international art stars.
He hated travelling or breaking his routine and, because of
his fear of flying, almost never attended the openings of
his own exhibitions outside New York. He was a devoted and
even old-fashioned family man, continuing to refer to his
wife Claire as a muse even when painting from other models.
His only real pastime outside the studio was writing
country-and- western songs on his acoustic guitar, and it
was a source of frustration and regret to him that he was
never successful in carving out a second career for himself
in this sphere. I sometimes had the feeling that he remained
somewhat embarrassed at following what might seem to a
working-class man like an unmasculine profession, and that
his insistence on sexualised images of women derived in part
from that discomfort.
Wesselmann's reputation perhaps suffered because of all of
these things, and in particular because of his refusal to
act the expected part of an urban sophisticate: I remember
hearing comments, however affectionately meant, about the
fact that he ate dinner at an unfashionably early hour. Yet
it was precisely his strong sense of being rooted in
ordinary life that brought such authority, authenticity and
sense of generosity to his art. Although there is much
good-humour in his paintings, there is never the slightest
hint of condescension or mockery. Another upside, for those
who knew him, is that he was unfailingly courteous,
easy-going, and totally lacking in the malice or career envy
that blights so much of what passes for human interaction in
the art world.
There can be no doubt that Wesselmann's art was as
innovative and extreme, and as brilliantly conceived and
composed as that of any of his immediate contemporaries. His
work of the Sixties was astonishing in its scope and
invention. In quick succession, he devised the still-life
"Bathtub Collages" and kitchen interiors that he made as
early as 1962, using found objects such as promotional
items, refrigerator doors or towels appended to the surface;
the billboard-sized collage paintings that followed a year
later, emblazoned with garish advertising images and
brightly hued patterns; the "Landscapes" from which
full-scale representations of life-sized cars were
projected; a series of "Seascapes", some on shaped canvases,
in which female breasts loom large in simplified silhouette
over the horizon; a series of disembodied lipsticked
"Mouths", with or without post-coital cigarettes, that
conveyed an almost insolent delight in sensual and sexual
pleasure; and the increasingly voyeuristic scenes of
intimacy labelled "Bedroom Paintings", which from the late
1960s vied for attention with his still-continuing series of
"Great American Nudes".
Much as he hated the notion of documenting the world around
him or of functioning as a kind of visual sociologist, the
fact remains that this 10-year run of work will stay deeply
embedded in the collective psyche as emblematic of the
vitality, openness and free spirit that we continue to
associate with the Sixties.
Often prone to accusations of vulgarity, Wesselmann
defiantly played up such aspects of his art in the 1970s,
particularly in works containing freestanding painted
elements on a gigantic scale. It was not until 1983, when he
made the first of an extended series of works from cut-out
steel or aluminium, that he was able to revitalise the terms
of his painting and to do so with a particular lightness of
touch.
The art world was (and is) slow to accept these late works,
but for me they remain among his most visually and
conceptually elegant artefacts: greatly enlarged from quick
pen sketches, fabricated under his supervision and then
often painted in deliriously festive colours, they compress
the initial spontaneous idea and its final realisation into
a single harmonious object. He explored multiple variations
on the format, venturing into sculpture as well as into his
first pure abstractions.
Nearly 20 years after instigating this new art form, about
which he remained nervously proprietorial, he returned to
oil on canvas for a highly successful and much admired
reprise of the "Great American Nudes" with which he had
first made his name as a young man in the early 1960s.
Marco Livingstone