Tom
Wesselmann

Wesselmann’s career started in the US Army in 1953 where he spent two years in military service. During that time he learned and then taught aerial photography interpretation. He began to draw cartoons about his time in the army, achieving some initial success with cartoon strips published in magazines such as 1000 Jokes and True.

When he returned to his hometown of Cincinannati, Wesselmann took up a BA in psychology at The University of Cincinnati, whilst also taking classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1956 Wesselmann moved to New York City to study art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and art where he met and was taught by artist Nicholas Marsicano. During this time he also met his wife and muse Claire Selley.

Early in his career Wessellmann was fascinated by the work of Willem de Kooning, but felt in order to grow as an artist he needed to find his own path. Moving away from ‘action’ painting, Wesselmann consciously focused on more traditional subject matters.

By the 1960s Wesselmann was working as one of America’s pioneering pop artists, creating collage and hybrid sketch artworks combining classic subject matters such as the female form, still life and interiors. In line with his Pop Art contemporaries, Wesselmann’s work often his work took the form of collage; his 1959 artwork Portrait Collage #1 uses a number of found objects, including board, cut out advertisements and organic matter in the form of a dried leaf.

Wesselmann found real success during the 1960s. During this time his collage artworks became more sexually charged, using found images from magazines and images of the female nude. His well known series The Great American Nudes was contemporaneously popular, and shot Wesselmann into mainstream consciousness and popularity.

During his lifetime Wesselmann exhibited internationally, taking part in several groundbreaking group shows in the 70s, and two major retrospectives that toured Europe and Japan towards the end of his career. His artworks are also housed in permanent collections across the globe, including Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Wesselmann is perhaps best known for his series of female nudes known as Great American Nudes. Artworks in this series are often sexually charged, honing in on a single body part - lips, a nipple or the model's tan lines. They use simple, clean colour palettes and have been described as ‘joyful’.

Despite Great American Nudes being a series attributed to the 1960s, Wesselmann returns to the subject of the female form again and again throughout his lifetime.

Wesselmann’s admiration of Willem de Kooning is widely documented. He has been quoted as saying 'In my early days, I was so envious of [Willem] de Kooning that I almost stopped being a painter' and '...He was what I wanted to be.' However, rather than follow de Kooning, Wesselmann consciously decided to create his own style, following a path away from abstraction. Wesselmann said 'The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art.'

Wesselmann’s work is also often linked to Pop Art, and though he never felt truly aligned with the movement there are undeniable parallels in medium and subject matter that link his work to that of contemporaries Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton.

Wesselmann worked in New York City for the majority of his career, over four decades. He lived with his wife and muse Claire, who appears in many of the artist's works, and his two daughters and son.

Wesselmann died in New York in 2004 at the age of 73.

Wesselmann’s later work of the 1990s and early 2000s saw the artist expanding on themes found in his artwork previously. Taking the bold line and colour found in his earlier nudes, Wesselmann created three dimensional forms which moved towards the abstraction he had previously avoided. In his own words he was 'going back to what I had desperately been aiming for in 1959.'

His final years saw the return of the female nude to his work with thick line work and bold colours (and tan lines) evocative of his earlier style.