Tom Wesselmann

TOM WESSELMANN (Ohio, 1931-New York, 2004).
"Smoking cigarette in ashtray".
Collage.
Signed.
Measurements: 16 x 17 cm; 41 x 41 cm (frame).

In his series of smoking ashtrays, Tom Wesselmann employed collage to compose visual images of equal parts decorative and conceptual aesthetics with simple forms. As in his iconic pop-art works, he uses bold, contrasting colors. The collage accentuates the graphic aspect of the composition, transforming the smoke into a sort of paper bow tie. At the time when Wesselmann created many of his works, the cigarette was an element associated with sensuality, cinema and advertising, terrains in which his proposals moved, dialoguing with those glamorous languages.

Tom Wesselmann was an American pop-art painter. He was one of the last great masters of American pop-art, very popular for his bold and striking female nudes. He enrolled for a degree in psychology in 1951, but the following year he was drafted for the Korean War. However, he was eventually stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. He created comic strips about military life, and later diversified his subjects.2 He left the Army (1954), resumed a career in psychology, and graduated in 1956. It was then that he moved to New York to devote himself to comics. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture until 1959. His first attempts as a painter, under the influence of Willem de Kooning, moved in the abstract expressionism then in vogue. In 1959 he produced his first abstract collages, but soon became interested in the figuration of Matisse, Van Gogh and Modigliani, and the following year he painted his first figurative works, including landscapes. His first solo show, at the Tanager Gallery in New York, took place in 1961. That same year he began his extensive cycle of Great American Nudes. The first were collages in small format, but the later ones were made in oil (Latin oleum oil) and with acrylic colors in large formats. In some of them he incorporated real objects. A canvas from this series, Nude No. 1, 1970, hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Later, he produced series on smokers, as well as huge still lifes with elements of everyday life, such as household appliances, bottles, ice cream. He experimented with sculpture, using cut-out plates. His graphic production is extensive and covers several techniques (lithography, serigraphy, aquatint). An important anthology was dedicated to him in Japan in 1993-94. In 1980 he wrote an autobiography under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth.