| Birth: | Feb. 23, 1931 | | Death: | Dec. 17, 2004 | 
Pop Artist. An internationally acclaimed figurative artist, his works reflected the style of Matisse but with his own distinct erotic spin to the simplified, mundane and sometimes comic imagery characteristic of Pop Art. Many of his works feature female figures, best known for his 100-piece "The Great American Nude" series of the 1960s. Initially worked in Abstract Expressionism. He started with brash collages, assemblages and environments using commonplace commodity articles and modelled on advertising catalogs, he usually combined these with the exhibitionistic pose of a female body. After Pop Art peaked, he continued to play variations on his themes of stylized female nudes and domestic still lifes and translated some of his pictorial ideas into assemblages of found objects and into linear sculptures of painted aluminum. Born in Cinncinnati, Ohio, he attended the University of Cincinnati, and earned a degree in psychology in 1956; after two years in the army, he attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati and then went to New York to study at the Cooper Union Art School. First one-man exhibition at the Tanager Gallery, New York, in 1961; followed by exhibition in The Figure at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962; included in Pop Goes the East at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 1963; and in the Young America 1965 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York. His exhibition Early Still-Lifes 1962-1964 began its tour of the USA at Balboa, California, in 1970. In 1974 his exhibition The Early Years: Collages 1959-62 toured the USA and the same year he was included in the exhibition American Pop Art, Whitney Museum, New York, and in Illusions of Reality at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Austrailia in 1976. His works have been included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Institute, Minneapolis, among others. Most recent exhibition was at JGM Galerie Paris, France in 2000. (bio by: Fred Beisser)
Cause of death: Complications following heart surgery
Search Amazon for Tom Wesselmann | | | Burial:
Unknown |
Maintained by: Find A Grave
Originally Created by: Fred Beisser
Record added: Dec 22, 2004
Find A Grave Memorial# 10164756 |
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