Featured Artist

Tom Wesselmann (February 23, 1931 - December 17, 2004) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and was an American pop artist who specialized in found art collages.

From 1949 to 1951 he attended college in Ohio; first at Hiram College, and then transferred to major in Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He was drafted into the US Army in 1952, but spent his service years stateside. He started making his first cartoons while still in the service, and became interested in cartooning as a career. After his discharge he decided to study drawing, so he completed his university studies in 1954 and, at the same time, entered the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He achieved some initial success when he sold his first cartoon strips which were published in the magazines 1000 Jokes and True.

In 1956 he was accepted into Cooper Union and moved to New York. The bustling New York art scene and museums inspired him.  After graduation Wesselmann became one of the founding members of the Judson Gallery, along with Marc Ratliff and Jim Dine, also from Cincinnat. 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.

Wesselmann first came to the attention of the art world with a series of works titled Great American Nude, begun in 1961. He had a dream about the colors red, white and blue, or, more specifically, 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. 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.

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.”

During the '70s, Wesselmann completed his "Nude" series and went down a specific path with his "Standing Still Life" paintings, which featured objects such as keys and a toothbrush magnified to larger-than-life scale on canvas. He also became known for the "Smokers" series, zeroing in on disembodied presentations of hands and lips, and his "Bedroom Painting" art, with close-ups of objects, forms and faces in vivid color.

Having become an established international artist who was also known for his printmaking, Wesselmann later played with ideas around sculpture and metalwork. In the new millennium he returned to the nude figure, this time in a more abstract sense though continuing his use of an electric palette.

Wesselmann died on December 17, 2004, in New York, after heart surgery, and was survived by his wife Claire and three