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Tom Wesselmann at Maxwell Davidson and Robert Miller - New York
Art in America, Nov, 2003 by Edward Leffingwell
Tom Wesselmann and his fellow Cincinnatian Jim Dine, as well as Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenburg, John Wesley and Andy Warhol, have been routinely characterized as "superb draftsmen." Yet Wesselmann is the only practitioner of this group of Pop affiliates to become identified with a single, fetishized image derived from pulp culture: the eyeless, red-lipped, large-nippled icon of his "Great American Nude" series. A well-considered survey of work from the 1960s at Maxwell Davidson, coincident with an exhibition of recent paintings and laser-cut steel reliefs at Robert Miller, showed where Wesselmann comes from and where he is today.
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Individual works at Maxwell Davidson demonstrated close affinities between Wesselmann's work and that of many of his contemporaries. It was appropriately dominated by Great American Nude No. 44 (1963). A life-size bordello interior reminiscent of a more politically engaged Ed Kienholz assemblage (Roxy's, 1961-62), Wesselmann's tableau is outfitted with a steam-heat radiator, working telephone and fur-collared coat affixed to an oil-on-canvas interior in which is ensconced a smiling, standing, spread-legged nude. Wesselmann's roughly 2-by-3-foot graphite drawing of an uninhabited, full-frontal Volkswagen in a bosky landscape, Drawing for Landscape #2 (1964), recalls the confident hand of Rivers. The raised, balletic leg against blue sky and clouds--Study for Seascape Leg (1966), a small, reductive drawing in pencil and thinned Liquitex--evokes the more quietly erotic women of Wesley. The silkscreen-on-vinyl, blow-formed edition of Cut-Out Nude (1965) anticipates Oldenburg's molded polyurethane edition, Profile Airflow (1969).
The point of the 22 objects from the 1960s included here was not solely contrived to recite those artists Wesselmann may have been looking at, or those who had been looking at Wesselmann. Rather, it conjured a small world of common esthetic interests. What this small survey also achieved was a surprisingly broad overview of the work of an artist of assurance and conviction, who has found his metier and is sticking to it. And yes, there they were in familiar array: the tan-lined beach girls of the "Great American Nude" series in the first years of their perpetual undress.
Recent work at Robert Miller surveyed the vibrant, mature Wesselmann in his ongoing journey into abstraction, with a selection of abstract reliefs in oil on laser-cut aluminum and a like number of carefree, increasingly abstracted nudes in oil on canvas. From 5 to 8 feet on a side, the canvases of Wesselmann's "Sunset Nude" series are variations of the "Great American Nude," with a full quorum of nipples as sufficient anatomy to identify them as such, and at least a fragment of the setting sun in each.
It appears at first glance that not much has changed in the 40 years since Wesselmann patented these cheerfully passive, libidinous blondes, but actually it has been more than 20 since he produced a group of nudes on canvas. The overall design of these new paintings is increasingly reductive. In several, the blonde-helmeted, recumbent figure turns as though to meet the viewer's gaze. But in Sunset Nude with Red Stockings (2003), Wesselmann observes an architecture of legs and arms and headless torso against an abstracted vase of red flowers and palm leaves that salute a setting sun, the curves recalling the cutout forms of late Matisse. In Sunset Nude with Matisse (2002), the figure lounges at curvaceous length, her back to the sea and the sunset. Behind her is a broadly limned quotation of Matisse's gypsy figure of the Rumanian Blouse (1939-40), Matisse's model cropped above the mouth, thus confining both figures to sightless affect.
This exhibition argued that these increasingly abstracted nudes are inextricably linked to Wesselmann's abstract cutouts of today, and to those oil-on-metal objects of decades past when a shaped metal Wesselmann piece often brought to mind Frank Stella's wall-mounted sculptures of the day. Matisse resurfaces in the graceful figures and scattered elements of Wesselmann's otherwise abstract Blue Dance (1999-2001).
The gestural quality of Wesselmann's broadly painted line seems as though it might have been maquetted with fat felt-tipped markers. He is attentive to overlapping painted shapes, darkens or lightens a color as though to reveal the shape below. His care for well-defined blocks of color is almost lapidary, like the intricately wrought components of stained-glass windows or a jeweler's cloisonne. The structure of bars and armatures that keep the whole together, painted white to disappear, is firmly grounded.
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