1959-1960

After graduation Wesselmann became one of the founding members of the Judson Gallery, along with Marc Ratliff and Jim Dine, also from Cincinnati, who had just arrived in New York. He showed a number of small collages at a two-man exhibition, together with Marc Ratliff, at Judson Gallery. To earn a living he started to teach art. and sometimes math, at a public school in Brooklyn, and later in the early 1960s he taught at the High School of Art and Design.

1961-1962

Wesselmann first came to the attention of the art world with this series, Great American Nude, begun in 1961. He had a dream about the colors red, white and blue, or. more specificly, the phrase “red, white and blue.” When he awoke he decided to do a “Great American Nude”; limiting his palette to those colors and any related patriotic colors: gold fringe on a flag, khaki (the colors of his old army uniform), etc. (S. Stealingworth, 1980 p. 20j. He began to incorporate patriotic imagery: stars, stripes. American landscape photos, and historic portraiture. He also reworked the colors and images from a formal point of view, with a preference for representation, as in Great American Nude #8, 1961. This was the result of intense experimentation, which also included works that tended towards abstraction, like Great American Nude #12, 1961. He moved on to new materials: pages taken from magazines and discarded posters from the walls of subway stations. The larger collage elements called for a larger format than Wesselmann had used previously. Collage coexisted with painting -either oils or acrylics – and with enamels and drawings, as works began to approach a giant scale he approached advertisers directly to acquire billboards.

He met Alex Katz through Henry Geldzahler and Katz offered Wesselmann a show at the Tanager Gallery, where he had his first solo show later that year. The exhibition represented both the large and small Great American Nude collages.

In 1962 Richard Bellamy offered him a one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery. About the same time, Ivan Karp of the Leo Castelli Gallery put him in touch with several collectors, and talked to him about Lichtenstein and Rosenquist’s works. which Wesselmann went to see, though without rioting any similarities with his own.

The Sidney Janis Gallery put on the important New Realists exhibition in November, which included works by Dine, Indiana, Lichtenstein. Oldenburg, Rosenthal, Segal, and Warhol, and Europeans such as Arman, Baj, Christo, Klein as well as Festa. Rotella, Tinguely, and Schifano. It came after the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris, and marked the international debut of a highly significant group of artists who were soon to give rise to what came to be called Pop Art or Nouveau Réalisme.

Wesselmann took part, with some reservation. in the New Realist show (cf. S. Stealingworth, 1980, p. 31) where he exhibited two works from 1962: Still life #17 and Still life #22.

Also in 1962 Wesselmann started working on a new series of still lifes, continuing the use of collage but incorporating real objects: he picked up shelves, television sets, a refrigerator (for Still Life #20) wherever he happened to find them, and turned them into new assemblages. The plastic corncob in Still Life #24 was bought by Wesselmann from a corn seller for fifty dollars. Great American Nude #2 was shown in the travelling exhibition entitled Recent Painting USA: The Figure, put on by MoMA, which also arranged a study day devoted to Pop Art in the same year.

1963-1964

While not a cohesive movement, the idea of ‘Pop Art’ (a name coined by Lawrence Alloway) was gradually spreading among international critics and the public. As Henry Geldzahler observed: “About a year and a half ago I saw the works of Wesselmann…. Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios (it was more or less July 1961). They were working independently, unaware of each other, but drawing on a common source of imagination. In the space of a year and a half they put on exhibitions, created a movement and we are now here discussing the matter in a conference. This is instant history of art, a history of art that became so aware of itself as to make a leap that went beyond art itself’ (H. Geldzahler, in Arts Magazine. 1963, p. 37).

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: “I dislike labels in general and ‘Pop’ in particular, especially because it overemphasizes the material used. There does seem to be a tendency to use similar materials and images, but the different ways they are used denies any kind of group intention” (interview with G. Swenson, ARTnews, 1964, p. 44).

His experimentation with still life intensified: in Still Life #28 he included a television set that was turned on, “interested in the competitive demands that a TV, with moving images and giving off light and sound, can make on painted portions” (S. Stealingworth, 1980, p. 16.) He concentrated on the juxtapositions of different elements and depictions, which were at the time truly exciting for him: “Not just the differences between what they were, but the aura each had with it. They each had such a fulfilled reality: the reverberations seemed a way of making a picture more intense. A painted pack of cigarettes next to a painted apple wasn’t enough for me. They are both the same kind of thing. But if one is from a cigarette ad and the other a painted apple, they are two different realities and they trade on each other; lots of things – bright strong colors, the qualities of materials, images from art histories or advertising – trade on each other. This kind of relationship helps establish a momentum throughout the picture…, therefore throughout the picture all the elements compete with each other. At first glance, my pictures seem well behaved, as if – that is a still life, O.K. But these things have such crazy give-and-take that I feel they get really very wild” (interview with G. Swenson, ARTnews, 1964, p. 44).

He took part in the touring exhibition New Directions in American Painting group exhibition with Still Life #25. In the show in Houston, Pop Goes the Easel, he exhibited Great American Nude #42, and in Boston Collects Modem Art, Great Amentan Nude #35 was exhibited. He married Claire Selley in November of 1963.

In 1964 he was at the Green Gallery with a new solo exhibition, and he took part in The Popular Image in London. Bathtub #3, 1963, was shown in New Directions in American Painting and Recent Acquisitions group exhibitions, both at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

Ben Birillo, an artist and Paul Bianchini’s business partner, contacted Wesselmann and other artists, including Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Watts, to put on The American Supermarket at the Bianchini Gallery in New York. This was the installation of a large supermarket where Pop works (Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, Watts’s colored wax eggs and so on) were shown among real food and neon signs.

He started working on landscapes: Landscape #2: Little Landscape #1, Landscape #1; the last of these three also has a soundtrack, the noise of a Volkswagen starting up. The first shaped canvas nudes appeared.

1965-66

Wesselmann had his third solo exhibition at the Green Gallery. His works in these years: Great American Nude #53, Great American Nude #57, show an accentuated, more explicit, sensuality, as though celebrating the rediscovered sexual fulfilment of his new relationship (cf. M. Livingstone, 1996).

He took part in the New American Realism group exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, and in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum.

In 1966 Wesselmann had his first solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, a relationship that endured until the gallery closed in 1999. He took part in the Art Market Part IV the Cincinnati Art Museum where he showed Still Life #44. He carried on working on his landscapes, but also made the Great American Nude #82, reworking the nude in a third dimension not defined by drawn lines but by medium: molded plexiglass modelled on the female figure, then painted.

His compositional focus also became more daring, as in the Great American Nude #78, narrowing down to isolate a single detail: as in Mouth #7 (with which in 1965 Wesselmann started his work on this subject) and later in that of a breast in his Seascapes the following year.

He took part in the Art in the Mirror and Contemporary American Still Life group exhibitions at MoMA.

He was included in the Dada 1916-1966 exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale Arte Moclerna in Rome. “When I came across this [Dadaism]… well, it had nothing to do with me… but when my work started developing, I sort of realized, not consciously but with surprise, that possibly it did indeed have something to do with my work” (interview with G. Swenson, ARTnews, 1964, p. 64).

1967-1968

Spending a lot of time in the country (on Cape Cod and upstate New York), he discovered a new dimension in his work. In contact with nature he made several small oil paintings that he turned into large-format works in his studio back in New York. He also started using an old projector to enlarge his studies up to sizes more suitable for the definitive version of the work.

The Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in Paris organized his first solo exhibition in Europe, while Dayton’s Gallery in Minneapolis and the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln put on a retrospective of thirty-six works. These included Still Life #26, #36, #46. #49, of 1964; Great American Nude #51, of 1963, and Great American Nude #75 of 1965, and a series of views; Landscape #5, Seascape #4, #7, of 1965, which were constructed from the negative space around a breast_ This began of the Drop-Out series in which “the central image, a breast, was omitted from the shaped canvas while the nipple and areola were retained…The shape is the shape one sees, for example, while lying alongside a woman who is seated on the beach” (cf. S. Stealingworth, 1980, p. 52). The breast and torso frame one side of the image while the arm and the leg from the other two sides.

Next to Mouth #4, #5, #6 of 1966, two new subjects appeared: Bedroom Painting #1, and the series devoted to smoking: Smoker Study #11, #13, #31, #34.

The Smokers came from a cigarette lit up during a pause by Peggy Sarno, the friend and model whose mouth Wesselmann was painting. The pictorial recording of that gesture led to a series of works that were to become one of the most recurrent themes in the 1970s (S. Stealingworth, 1980, p. 52). He started working on shaped canvases and opted for increasingly large formats. Among the shaped works were Seascape #22, Still Life # 56 and Great American Nude #98.

A participant at the 9th Biennale in São Paulo, Brazil, the following year he was exhibited in Kassel for the fourth Documenta.

1969-1970

He worked constantly on the Bedroom Painting series in which elements of the Great American Nude, Still Lifes and Seascapes were juxtaposed (as can be seen in Bedroom Painting #26). With these works Wesselmann began to concentrate on a few details such as hands. feet (the first appear in Little Seascape #1 of 1965,. 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. He continued to rework his own vocabulary; the mouths of the Smokers can only just be seen through the clouds of smoke, and he started on the Great American Nude #100, 1970. the last of his “Great American Nudes”, which he finished in 1973. The breast of a concealed woman appeared in a box among Wesselmann’s sculpted still life elements in a piece entitled Bedroom Tit Box, a key work that “…in its realness and intemal scale the scale relationships between the elements) represents the basic idea of the Bedroom Painting” (S. Stealingworth, 1980, p. 64).

Still Life # 57 was acquired by MoMA. The Sidney Janis Gallery put on a new solo exhibit. The monographic Early Still Lifes: 1962-1964 was presented at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California.

1971-1975

In 1972 Wesselmann had exhibitions in New York at the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Rosa Esman Gallery, and in Europe at the Aronowitsch Gallery in Stockholm. He made Still Life #59, five panels that form a large, complex dimensional, freestanding painting: here too the elements are enlarged, and part of a telephone can be seen. A nail-polish bottle is tipped up on one side, and there is a vase of roses with a crumpled handkerchief next to it, and the framed portrait of a woman, actress Mary Tyler Moore, whom Wesselmann considered the Ideal prototype girlfriend. These are works in which he made more recognizable portraits, with a less anonymous feel. In Bedroom painting #12 he inserted a self-portrait.

Still Life #60 appeared in 1974: the monumental outline, almost 26 feet long, of the sunglasses acts as a frame for the lipstick, nail polish and jewelry; a microcosm of contemporary femininity that Wesselmann took to the level of gigantism.

His Smokers continued to change: he introduced the hand, with polished fingernails sparkling in the smoke. He started using photographs he took of his friend and model Danielle in order to make works in oils (ibid., p. 66)

He exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery and at the Calorie des Cluetre Mouvements in Paris, where he showed a series of Smoker Studies and sketches for his Bedroom Paintings, as well as the Great American Nude #100 which he had just finished. With this he brought to an end the series devoted to the Great American Nude which, in its very name recalls the ironic cartoon-style titles of the Sixties: the “Great American Dream” and the ‘Great American Novel”. But of course the incontrovertible sensuality of Wesselmann’s nudes was constantly accompanied by an ironic guiding thread that was cleat,’ revealed in the artist’s own words: “Painting, sex, and humor are the most important things in my life” (interview with I. Sandler, 1984). His works were shown in a solo exhibit, Wesselmann – The Early Years – Collages 1959-1962 at California State University at Long Beach, and in American Art Since 1945 from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art group exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum. This last exhibition toured to seven venues in 1975 and 1976.

1976-1978

In 1976 there was an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, followed by another the next year. The Galleria Giò Marconi hosted a solo exhibition in Milan. Early in 1977 he was selected for the American Art Since 1945 group show at MoMA, and started work on a new series of Bedroom Paintings. In these works he revised the formal construction of the composition, which was now cut by a diagonal, with one entire section being taken up by a woman’s face in the very near foreground: Bedroom Painting #43, Bedroom Painting #38, Bedroom Painting #39 (all made in 1978). The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston organized Tom Wesselmann: Graphics 1964-1977, and he exhibited at the Grand Palais in Pans and at the Galerie Serge de Bloe in Brussels.

1979-1982

In 1980 what is still today one of the most accurate and complete study of the evolution of the artist’s work was published. The monograph Tom Wesselmann is an autobiography written under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth.

A new exhibition, New Sculpture and Paintings by Tom Wesselmann, a solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery was held in 1980. His family was complete when, after daughter Jenny and son Lane, his daughter Kate was born.

He made Sneakers and Purple Panties in 1981: a large still life on shaped canvas with simply a pair of sneakers and purple panties as the subject.

The Margo Leavin Gallery of Los Angeles presented a solo exhibition.

1983-1984

New Work by Tom Wesselmann was shown at Sidney Janis Gallery, and works were displayed at the Sander Gallery in New York and at the Delahunty Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

He made his first work in metal, Steel Drawing #1 , which led to a series of works in steel and aluminum to which Wesselmann devoted all his energy in these years. The incorporation of negative space that had begun in the Drop-Out series was continued into a new medium and format.

They started out as works in black and white, enabling him to redevelop the theme of the nude and its composition: “These work began when I was drawing negative drop-out shapes from the model, and for the first time I put two shapes in relation to each other, an arm shape and a leg shape. Then I thought it would be interesting to connect them with a body lino.. this began the works with interior lines continuing outside the painting” (S.Hunter, 1993, pp. 27-28). At the same time he was also able to work on a variety of applications of drawing: “I was trying to test a specific idea, to let the lines continue in space outside the image on the wall… As the paintings evolved, it became more interesting for me to see the drawing separate more and more from the painting. The idea was to treat the line as a formal element in itself. I had never done that before: the linear gesture continued onto the wall… I discovered that even in metal the drawing gesture could leave the painting” (ibid. p. 29). In 1983 Wesselmann was seized by the idea of doing a drawing in steel, as if the lines on paper could be lifted off and placed on a wall. Once in place the drawings appeared to be drawn directly on the wall. This idea preceded the available technology for lasers to mechanically cut metal with the accuracy Wesselmann needed. He had to invest in the development of a system that could accomplish this, but it took another year for that to be ready.

The impact of the first six steel drawings attached to the white wall was amazing, but Wesselmann took his idea further and decided to make them in color: he took Steel Drawing #5 and painted it white. Then came color: When a nude was done in black it was, forcefully, a drawing. When the same steel drawing was done In color, it became a nude more than a drawing. The subject matter, that is, became the more dominant element” (ibid, p. 34).

As well as colored metal nudes, in 1984 he started working on new landscapes. These were rapid sketches that were later enlarged and made in aluminum when the process was perfected in the late 1980’s.

In 1984 curator Barbara Haskell included his work in BLAM! The explosion of Pop. Minimalism and Performance 1958-64 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1985 -1988

The use of metals obliged Wesselmann to experiment with various techniques: those in aluminum were cut by hand, and those in steel were shaped by laser, though not without some difficulty. The most effective system, that of working the image on the computer, came a few years later with the development of that technology. Wesselmann researched and launched the first artistic use of laser-cut metal. Metal fabricators, who would not ordinarily be so inclined. were adapting the new technology to meet Wesselmann’s requests and needs. Early in this period. however, the fabricator was still cutting the steel by hand.

He exhibited in Düsseldorf with his solo show Cut-Outs at the Galerie Denise René Hans Mayer. He then took part in the group exhibition entitled The 60’s organized by the Fondation Cartier in Pads. He was included in the Contemporary Cut-Outs exhibition at the Whitney Museum. His 1988 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery. Tom Wesselmann. New Works, was exclusively works on cut-out steel or aluminum

The following year he exhibited at the 43rd Biennale in Venice, and then with a one-man show at the Tokoro Gallery in Tokyo. The Stein Bartlow Gallery in Chicago put on a travelling retrospective entitled Tom Wesselmann Retrospective-Graphics and Multiples.

1989-1992

Blunt Heiman Gallery in Santa Monica held a one-man show in 1989, as did Galerie Joachim Becker in Cannes.

In 1990 Wesselmann exhibited cut-out landscapes at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and the Studio Trisorio in Naples showed Tom Wesselmann, Laser Nudes. These were followed by the solo Wesselmann: Graphics/Multiples Retrospective 1964-1990 at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; Tom Wesselmann Black and Gray, at the Edward Totah Gallery in London; Tom Wesselmann – Recent Still Lifes and Landscapes, at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo.

His metal works continued to go through a constant metamorphosis: My Black Belt, 1990, a seventies subject, acquired a new vivacity that forcefully defined space in the new medium.

The Drawing Society made a video directed by Paul Cummings in which Wesselmann makes a portrait of a model and a work in aluminum. He took part in the Figures of Contemporary Sculpture group exhibition at the Isetan Museum in Tokyo, and in the 20th Century Masters-Works on Paper, at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and in Azur at the Fondation Cartier in Jouy-en-Josas.

1993-1998

“Since 1993 I’ve basically been an abstract painter. This is what happened: in 1984 I started making steel and aluminum cut-out figures. First I painted them, and then hung transparent plastic panels on them and…got the colors and the positioning right (the image was very often fairly complex, and I only had a black-and-white ink drawing: it wasn’t easy to pull out the colas from the complex web of white lines). After finishing the work, I cut the panels in pieces and cast them aside. One day I got muddled up with the remnants and I was struck by the infinite variety of abstract possibilities. That was when I understood I was going back to what I had desperately been aiming for in 1959, and I started making abstract three-dimensional images in cut metal. I was happy and free to go back to what I wanted: but this time not on de Kooning’s terms but an mine”. (interview with E. Giustacchini, Stile Ansi. 2003, p. 29). The Sidney Janis Gallery put on a solo exhibit called New Metal Paintings and a new travelling retrospective (1959-1992) was presented at the Isetan Museum of Art in Shinjuku, Japan. A video was made by Mick Rock for this Japanese tour.

Another important retrospective (1959-1993) organized by Thomas Buchsteiner and Otto Letze for the Institut fur Kulturaustausch Tubingen. Germany, traveled to Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Nies Museum, Berlin; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Kunsthal, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer, Germany; Fundacion Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; Fundacion Juan March, Madrid; Palais de la Virreina. Barcelona; Culturgest, Lisbon; Musée de l’Art Moderne, Nice, France.

Wesselmann was then passionately devoted to two subjects: the new abstract format, and his long standing interest in the female nudes. For the abstracts he preferred an uncontrolled, almost random approach, making compositions in which the metal cut-out shapes were more akin to painted gestural brushstrokes, as in Breakout, 1996, Round Two, 1997, and Pink Pearl, 1998.

His nudes, on the other hand, reveal echoes of the past, as can be seen in the small series made in 1997 which comes back to life in the rectangular outlines of a canvas and in the change of technique to oil painting. These are reworkings of 1960s images: 1962 Plus 35 Nude Sketch I, 11 Ill: 32-Year-old on the Beach, and, from the late 1970s, Face with Goldfish. These canvases: “…constitute an unexpected but highly satisfying nostalgic return to a youthful episode in the very midst of one of the most radical changes of style in Wesselmann’s career. Self-contained and complete in themselves, they seem more likely to stand alone rather than to lead to further reinterpretations of Sixties motifs. In other words they should not be taken as a sign that Wesselmann is embarking on an extended re-engagement with his classic Pop phase, in the way that Warhol and Lichtenstein did towards the end of their lives In their Reversals and Reflections series respectively” (M. Livingstone. 1999, p. 6).

Alongside them there are works made of aluminum, with brilliant colors and an accentuated thickness of lines and fiat backgrounds that anticipate the final outcome of his Sunset Nudes.

1996 brought numerous solo exhibitions: Paper Moquettes at Sidney Janis Gallery, a Retrospective (1959-1995) at Fred Hoffman’s in Santa Monica. in Singapore at the Wetterling Teo Gallery and at Maxwell Davidson Gallery in New York. The following year, 1998, he exhibited at Hans Mayer’s in Dülisseldorf, and at Benden and Klimczak in Viersen, Germany.

1999-2000

In 1999 he made his first metal Smoker work with Smoker #1 (3-0), as a relief in aluminum, taking up the subject of smoke again, but this time in three dimensions. In the same year there were several solo exhibitions including: Small Survey: Small Scale at the Maxwell Davidson Gallery, and also at Gallery Camino Real in Boca Raton, Florida.

The ambiguity between line and color, between drawing and painting. continued In his oils: Blue Nude Drawing: Claire 321/97 (both dated 1999); Blue Nude (2000), a painting that led on to a series of blue nudes made in shaped aluminum that went on exhibition in December 2000 at the Joseph Heiman Gallery. These played on the alternation of positive shapes (in blue) and negative (in white) and were closely inspired by the cut-out figures made by Matisse in his later years. floating on the walls with elegance and sensuality.

He had two shows with Galerie Benden and Klimczak: Paintings and Metal Works in Viersen and Abstract Maquettes, in Cologne in 2000.

2001-2004

The abstract works in these years underwent a further change with a retum to compositions, with firmer lines and a chromatic range that favored primary colors, making clear reference to Mondrian: Manhattan Beauty, and New York City Beauty (both 2001).

Works were shown at the Pop Impact! group exhibition, at the Whitney Museum, and at the Les Années Pop exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Pans.

He started working on the Sunset Nude series. in which he went back to a pictorial classicism that shows the influence of Matisse’s nudes. Though he had loved Matisse during his early years of training, he had had to move away from his influence in order to render with greater self-assurance the complex compositions of nudes and interiors that struck him most: -Matisse was just so incredibly good… He was the painter I most idolized” (interview with C. Lebenszeztejn, 1975, p. 70).

He was able to take a first-hand look at the works of the French master in the Gouaches Découpées exhibition at MoMA in 1960, and forty years later paid homage in his Sunset Nude, in Sunset Nude with Matisse, 2002, in which he inserted the painting La Blouse Romaine, 1939-1940. In Sunset Nude with Pink and Yellow Tulips, in Sunset Nude #3, which is dominated by the juxtaposition of swathes of flat color. the absence of chiaroscuro and an intricate play of lines in which it is possible to see continuous cross-references of positive and negative shapes. It is the mixture between background and figure, the simplification and concision of the details, and the linear compositional skill that Wesselmann takes from the works of Matisse.

He painted Sunset Nude with Matisse Apples on Pink Table Cloth, 2003, and held important solo exhibitions at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. at the University of California, Long Beach. and at Galeria Flora Bigai in Venice: here, the catalogue included an essay by Stealingworth.

The following year he made the abstract Five Stop in aluminum, and exhibited a series of Sunset Nudes at Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London. These nudes are set against exotic backgrounds. lit up by sanguine sunsets. enveloped by tropical vegetation in Sunset Nude with Palm Trees or Sunset Nude with Big Palm Trees, 2004.

The female icon of the new millennium is painted but not described, the decoration enchants, the compositional planes overlap, the borderline between the two most significant areas of his work, figurative and abstraction, is diminished.

In these last ten years Wesselmann’s health was showing the consequences of heart disease, but his studio work remained constant. He made Bedroom Breast, 2004, a painted metal relief, referring back to his earlier work, and also Man Ray at the Dance, a large canvas painting, at more than eight by six feet, and eight Sunset Nudes including Sunset Nude with Frame, a painted metal work. Following surgery for his heart condition, Tom Wesselmann died on December 17th of that year.