Description
Study for Bedroom Blonde with Lavender Wallpaper. Original color pencil and liquitex on Ragboard, 1985.
Tom Wesselmann is one of the biggest American pop artists today. Even he did not like being labeled a pop artist, it is hard to imagine that his artworks featuring consumer goods and assorted American icons would be considered anything but pop art. At first he was a follower of abstract expressionism, but later switched to figurative art. In the late ‘50s he produced a series of small format collages, which became the basis for his future nudes and still life. In 1963 he married Claire Selley, his most faithful model from the series Great American Nude, and other nudes. In his search for creative styles he began to produce three-dimensional works with the technique of assemblage, using everyday objects such as telephones and televisions. In the Still Life series he used advertising techniques and complemented traditional still life with mass consumption items taken directly from ads. In the ‘80s he began to work with metals and produced original works with a special laser. Over the next two decades he returned to large formats and the theme of the nude from the ‘60s, rounding off his career with The Sunset Nude series, inspired by the works of Matisse. Tom Wesselmann went down in history as one of the greatest representatives of pop art due to his exciting commercial images, his aggressive intervention in three dimensions, his choice of trivial motifs, their monumentalization, the use of stereotypes as a basis for his work and the choice of strong colors. Wesselmann’s aesthetic usage of everyday objects was done not in criticism of American consumerism and culture, but as a way to render Classical genres modern so as to explore the gap between art and contemporary life. This drawing was composed of solid vivid color shapes and interior voids, which became the ideal medium for his clean lines and flattened forms. The thick outlines of this erotic figure are reminiscent of Wesselmann’s ‘steel drawings’ or doodles made in that time, which tells us that the emphasis was on the line and the drawing. Fast and short strokes only indicate the room and elements on the background of the nude, while in the foreground there are extremely dominant erotic details typical for his nudes – pink lips and nipples, which are in contrast with the model’s blond hair.
