Monica Undressing by Tom Wesselmann

Monica Undressing by Tom Wesselmann

Tom Wesselmann was a prolific printmaker. Tom Wesselman Print’s touched upon the medium in the 1960s and 1970s, it was from 1980 that Tom Wesselmann began to take the print medium seriously and devoted more time to the art of printmaking. Tom Wesselman, working in both lithograph and screen print, Tom Wesselman created the majority of his editions as screen prints, a large number of them being created based on sitters Claire, Monica and Vivienne. Often extremely large in format, Tom Wesselmann’s pop imagery lends itself naturally to the screen print medium and the results are bright, crisp and iconic.

Hence, he became known for his “Great American Nude” series, linked to more classical works. Due to his particular aesthetic, he was seen, along with figures like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as one of the purveyors of Pop Art,

Tom Wesselmann is considered one of the major artists of New York PopArt , along with Lichtenstein, and Warhil. Best known for his 1960s series “Great American Nude,” which featured flat figures in an intense palette of red, white, blue, and other patriotic colors, Wesselmann, in an effort to reject  Abstraxt made collages and assemblages that incorporated everyday objects and advertising ephemera. In the early 1980s, he produced his first “Metal Works,” in which he shaped canvases and cut metal to create abstract three-dimensional images. In his final years, Wesselmann returned to the female form in the “Sunset Nudes” series, where the compositions, abstract imagery, and sanguine moods recall the odalisques of Matisse.