Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004, born Cincinnati, Ohio) was a painter and sculptor whose bold, sensuous work in the Pop Art tradition combined the visual language of advertising and consumer culture with a sustained engagement with the nude, producing a body of work that stands as one of the most distinctive achievements in postwar American art. Initially trained as a cartoonist and psychologist, Wesselmann moved to New York in the late 1950s and began developing his signature approach, incorporating real objects, printed imagery, and collaged elements into canvases of flat, saturated color that drew on Matisse, billboard aesthetics, and the formal rigor of abstract painting simultaneously.
His Great American Nude series, begun in 1961 and sustained across decades, reduced the female figure to bold curves, bright flesh tones, and graphic simplicity. His Still Life series brought the same vocabulary to the iconography of American consumer culture, treating bottles, flowers, and food with a formal attention that elevated the mundane into something both beautiful and unsettling. In his later years he developed shaped metal sculptures that extended the vocabulary of his paintings into three dimensions with remarkable fluency.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.