Tom Wesselmann

Artist's Estate

Imago Galleries, Palm Desert (acquired in 2005)

Private Collection, California

Sotheby's, New York, 3 March 2016, lot 66

Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above sale)

Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, Joseph Helman Gallery, Tom Wesselmann, Blue Nudes, November - December 2000

Paris, Galerie Mitterand, Tom Wesselmann, Blue Nudes, March - April 2002

Executed in 2000, Blue Female Nude #17 belongs to the celebrated Blue Nudes series initiated in 1999. This series is widely considered among the most accomplished works of Wesselmann’s late career. In these compositions the artist distils the female form to its essential contours, rendering the body in fluid, rhythmic lines across a vibrant monochrome surface. 

"It is the mixture between background and figure, the simplification and the concision of the details, and the linear compositional skill that Wesselmann takes from the works of Matisse." (BLOUIN ARTINFO) The female nude remained the artist’s most enduring motif throughout his career. Revisiting a theme deeply rooted in the history of Western painting, Wesselmann transformed the traditional subject through a distinctly modern visual language. 

As he rose to prominence in the early 1960s with his groundbreaking explorations of the female nude, he was frequently grouped with Pop artists, Wesselmann himself resisted the label, insisting that his work was driven less by cultural commentary than by a pursuit of formal beauty and pictorial intensity. Flattened planes of color, bold contour lines and simplified compositions allowed him to explore the dynamic tension between figuration and abstraction, creating images that are at once sensual, graphic and strikingly immediate.

With its sweeping contours, luminous monochrome palette and elegant economy of form, the present work exemplifies the refinement of Wesselmann’s late practice. The cut aluminum support reinforces the sculptural quality of the image, allowing the figure to emerge with remarkable clarity and presence. Distilling decades of exploration into a single, powerful image, Blue Female Nude #17 stands as a testament to the artist’s ability to reinvent one of art history’s most enduring subjects through the language of modern painting.