Tom Wesselmann

"I was looking at Matisse, but he had done all those exaggerations of the figure in his compositional interventions and I decided to play it as straight as I could, with no tricks. " (the artist cited in Sam Hunter, Tom Wesselmann, Barcelona 1995, p. 16)

"[Wesselmann's]  brilliant, sensual style and concentration on erotic subject matter, so shocking a few years ago, already have taken on a remarkably 'classic' look. Certainly he has done much to reinstate the nude as a subject for serious modern art. And his lush, Matisse-derived colour forms, infused with Pop literalism, have helped establish a uniquely American way of painting that is at once formal, figurative and plain fun." (Anon., 'Tom Wesselmann: Pleasure Painter' in Avant Garde, November 1968)

If Tom Wesselmann's Pop vision is associated with one single image it is this: the recumbent, red-lipped libidinous female of his Great American Nude series.

Executed in 1967, Great American Nude #91 is an outstanding work from the hundred-piece series that constituted his primary contribution to the explosion of American Pop Art that took the New York art world by storm in the 1960s. Recreating the monumental scale of the billboards from which Wesselmann derived his iconoclastic iconography, this is one of the finest examples of his shaped canvases. Begun in 1960, this watershed series fused the revered odalisques of art historical tradition with the prurient Playboy pinups of contemporary popular culture. Effortlessly combining the sacred and the profane, throughout the 1960s Wesselmann developed a signature style that mixed elements purloined from the canon of Fine Art, in particular the Matissian nude, with inane images extracted from the ubiquitous mass-media advertisements.

The earliest prototypes were executed on a small tentative scale, tiny collages of nudes in tight, patterned interiors reminiscent of Matisse's nudes such as Nu sur Fond Bleu, 1923, but incorporating anti-aesthetic materials such as linoleum. The small scale was a source of frustration for Wesselmann, however attempts to work on a slightly larger scale were both unsuccessful and restricted by the size of his studio. In 1961, he boldly took a small collage and enlarged it from five inches to four feet, creating the first in the series Great American Nude #1. The present example, made the year after Wesselmann joined the Sidney Janis Gallery, at a time when he was buoyed by huge commercial success, shows the artist at the height of his powers. Now confident and expert at using an overhead projector to enlarge his initial drawings, he moves towards a much more expansive, dizzying scale. Unlike earlier works which incorporated elements of collage - both fabric and manufactured domestic objects - here he relies on liquitex alone to create a fabulously flat surface that imitates the de-personalised, airbrushed elegance of advertisements. Wesselmann's female is blank, stereotyped according to mass-media standards that rob her of all individuality. Ironically, this quintessentially twentieth-century mode of expression which could not exist without the mass-media, looks back to the neo-classical ideal of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Like Wesselmann's women, the impossible curves of Ingres's odalisques were not representative of the physiognomies of the nineteenth-century female form, but were the manifestations of the projected desires of a specific aesthetic era. Plastic and flat, the confidently schematised forms of Wesselmann's nudes are similarly the by-product of their specific time, the age which witnessed the burgeoning growth of consumerism. 

Part of the brave new collective impulse of Pop, it is difficult today in our media-saturated world to fully grasp the potency of this painting when it was first exhibited. To use images from popular magazines, especially in Wesselmann's cool, sardonic and ostensibly impersonal manner, seemed an affront to those who valued the heroic spiritual aspirations of the Abstract Expressionists. Reacting against de Kooning in particular, an artist whom he nonetheless admired for his gut-wrenching immediacy, Wesselmann set about challenging the cult of automatism and spontaneity on which the older generation based their claims of authenticity. In his search for a new visual vocabulary, Great American Nude #91, shows Wesselmann to be just as formally adroit, historically informed and aesthetically ambitious as his Abstract Expressionist predecessors. The present work reveals the artist's complete mastery of line and his ability to achieve the illusion of depth with the least possible amount of modelling.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his subject matter, which was interpreted by many, including Clement Greenberg, as being too readily recognizable and easily accessible to qualify as high art, Wesselmann's Pop vision belied a much deeper conceptual understanding of how the modern media was affecting modern life. While Andy Warhol's screen-printing technique replicated the mechanics of mass-media image making, Wesselmann's art honed in on the seductive strategies employed by advertising agencies. Enshrining the subliminal appeal of glamorous images that seek to awaken the desires rather than needs of the new consumer-driven psyche, the Great American Nudes both expose and undermine the marketing tactics of big business. In an age where the mass-media - a newly coined term - was a focal point for critical discourse, Wesselmann demonstrates an astute and precocious understanding of its potential impact.

In Great American Nude #91, the female form is overtly sexualised, having evolved from the sensual to the flagrantly erotic. Reclining with her legs spread-eagle on a leopard-skin bedcover, this faceless female is predominantly described by her erogenous zones. A hyperbole of the vapid Miss Americas that populate advertising hoardings peddling brand products, she is an amplification of the statement that sex sells. No matter how explicit, however, Wesselmann's style is too remote, glazed and impersonal for it to be pornographic. For Wesselmann, art is inherently aggressive in purely formal terms and it is this quality that he sought to salvage from the vestiges of Abstract Expressionism. His blatant sexual imagery simply reinforces the expressive impact of his work, making the message stronger and more confrontational. On the one hand posing an authoritative challenge to social hypocrisy and moral prudery, it is also a mocking satire of contemporary American life and the idealised Great American Dream from which the series takes its punning title.