Word: wesselmann
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...generation of artists painted what they saw, rejecting abstractions and bucolic panoramas in favor of the edgy cityscapes of the new age. The exhibit opens with a monumental oil and collage by American Tom Wesselmann depicting a towering six-pack of Royal Crown Cola, a fat loaf of Sunbeam bread and a can of Libby's beef stew obscuring a view of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral. That jarring juxtaposition embodies a fundamental tenet of Pop: that the everyday artifacts of consumer society defined a new aesthetic, stretching traditional conceptions of appropriate subjects and blurring the distinction between high...
...reflected on the surface of passing cars and wet asphalt. Rudy Burckhardt's photograph of an enormous Coca-Cola billboard dwarfing pedestrians on the street below is a masterpiece of black and white composition. Nor did the pop generation shrink from taking on the most traditional of subjects. In Wesselmann's Great American Nude No. 54, a painted female form sprawls beside a 3-D radiator, a telephone and a table adorned with ice cream sundaes - a reminder that this was the era of hedonism and sexual revolution, in which the human body also became a consumer object...
There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...
Painter Tom Wesselmann, like de Kooning before him, has refused to choose sides in the controversy between abstract expressionism and the new realism. Instead, his female nudes, often in monumental proportions, inhabit both schools. The results of his energetic production are collected in the 200 pictures-100 in high-intensity color-in Tom Wesselmann (Abbeville; 321 pages; $75). The artist's huge women are usually blank idealizations adrift in mundane rooms, like the fantasies of adolescent boys. Others display explicit but deadpan eroticism among billboard-style oranges and ashtrays. Always provocative, usually amusing and sometimes shocking, Wesselmann...
...become a sort of madeleine. Irrevocably, the cachet of pop has gone, and many of its artifacts now look tenuous. It cannot be long before some enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) opens a '60s Period Room, to go with its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling and reassembled colonial parlor: a Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table strewn with multiples and macadarnia nuts, a Panther poster above the vinyl settee, and under the supergraphic in the corner a waxwork group of Henry Geldzahler hustling that week's trend to a slim, wrinkled matron...