{"id":1014,"date":"2021-03-24T15:17:24","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T15:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/cfam\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2021-04-01T13:49:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T13:49:23","slug":"the-underappreciated-tom-wesselmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/rma\/2021\/03\/24\/the-underappreciated-tom-wesselmann\/","title":{"rendered":"The Underappreciated Tom Wesselmann"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few weeks ago,<\/a> I wrote about Wayne Thiebaud, whose career has been much more varied than I had previously understood. This week, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to consider another such artist, the similarly underappreciated Tom Wesselmann. If Thiebaud is best known today for his early paintings of sticky-sweet confections, Wesselmann is undoubtedly known for this long-running exploration of the nude, in particular in his Great American Nude<\/em> series, which paired the colors of the American flag with a frank eroticism uncommon even in the libertine 1960s. It was these works that first brought Wesselmann attention as part of the Pop generation that also included Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Like fellow Cincinnatian Jim Dine<\/a>, Wesselmann expressed discomfort with his inclusion in the group, though to my eye (and to those of many scholars) his inclusion makes a good deal of sense. After all, Wesselmann\u2019s nudes are often accompanied by iconic American consumer goods\u2014in particular cigarettes\u2014in addition to being rendered in the same crisp, hard-edged style explored by his contemporaries.1<\/sup> As my research\u2014and a perusal of the three prints by Wesselmann in the CFAM collection\u2014reveals, however, Wesselmann was actually much more than just a painter of heroically scaled naked women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n