Bedroom face with orange

1987
silkscreen

Style/Movement: Pop Art

Noted art historian Lucy Lippard called Tom Wesselmann one of the five "hard-core" New York pop artists, joining Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Oldenburg. The phrase defines the brazen quality of Wesselmann’s painted images of still lifes, nudes, and abstract landscapes.

As a young art student, Wesselmann was strongly influenced by the work Willem de Kooning, and from this great abstract expressionist he gained a sense of filling a canvas and pushing images to the outer edges. Wesselmann explored collage and assemblages, and these designs were to be precursors to his famous 100-piece Great American Nude series of the 1960s.

Flat, bright, billboard colors set against clean a white background – a style that that hints at techniques used in advertising posters ¬¬– have defined the artist’s work. In addition to his paintings, Wesselmann created 3-dimensional pieces in aluminum, steel and enamel.