NEW YORK CITY (AP) - Tom Wesselmann, a Pop artist best known for his modern take on the reclining female nude, has died at age 73.
NEW YORK CITY (AP) â Tom Wesselmann, a Pop artist best known for his modern take on the reclining female nude, has died at age 73.
Wesselmann died December 17 at New York University Medical Center of complications after heart surgery, said Emilio Steinberger of the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea, where Wesselmann had a show last year.
Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati in 1931 and was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. Afterward, he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, then moved to New York in 1956 to attend the Cooper Union School of the Arts.
By the late 1950s he was making large collages from magazine clippings and found objects, usually combined with an image of a female nude.
Wesselmann had his first solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery in New York in 1961. In 1962, he participated in the exhibition âThe Figureâ at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the 1960s, Wesselmann expanded on his collages in still lifes and interiors-with-nudes that often combined painted images with real objects including radios, television sets, refrigerator doors and bathroom fixtures. In his âSmokersâ series of the 1970s he zeroed in on the female nude with a series of enormous cutout details: ruby-red lips, manicured fingernails and cigarettes. At the time of his death he was working on a series of nudes painted in an Abstract Expressionist style.
Wesselmann is survived by his wife Claire, daughters Kate Wesselmann and Jenny Wesselmann, and son Lane, all of New York.