Tom Wesselmann

Great American Nude #17, executed in 1961, is a very early example of Tom Wesselmann’s seminal series of paintings with the same title, begun in the year this work was executed. The present work sits at the very birth of the Pop movement. Slim Stealingworth notes that artist’s conflict with the nudes – namely whether to make them realistic or abstract. Both directions interested Wesselman and his early Great American Nudes vary greatly in terms of their relative mimetic power, with the artist experimenting often with the structure of the female form and its place within the compositional whole. The preset example presents the viewer with a serene figure, seemingly plucked from Matisse’s or Bonnard’s world. The contours of her flesh are starkly delineated against the striped cushion upon which she lies. The figure (usually modeled by his wife, Claire) is almost ideogrammatic here, with hardly any detail available for the viewer to read a sense of personality. As Stealingworth notes, “Almost all faces were left off because the nudes were not intended to be portraits in any sense. Personality would interfere with the bluntness of the fact of the nude.” (Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann, New York, 1980, p. 24). Passages of ‘reality’ do enter the pictorial realm though. Actual fabric has been used in this early example; later examples would incorporate an array of real objects, such as clocks, radiators, doors and windows. Here, however, the fabric used lends no explanation of space or time. It adds to the flatness the artist seeks here, as if the flat, bright colors one finds here came straight out of a slick, color magazine. In this sense, the American nude we see here is not a portrait, but, ultimately, an object of desire.