How pop was Tom Wesselmann, really?
If you’re the Kreeger Museum, the answer is: popper than pop. “A Pop Art icon,” even, according to the publicity accompanying Wesselmann’s drawings show on view at the Kreeger through July 30.
What else were they going to say? Institutions don’t host shows about a “lesser light of pop” or an “exuberant but conservative pop-art bench player” or an “ambiguous figure on the margins of pop who himself seemed iffy about the whole enterprise.”
Yet all of those labels apply to Wesselmann, an artist working in and around the earliest inklings of American pop that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and who was ultimately overshadowed by the tougher mettle of his colleagues Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg.
The signature Wesselmann is “Great American Nude,” a series he began in 1961, just two years after his art school graduation. He returned to that title again and again, serializing it with numbers — “Great American Nude #20,” “Great American Nude #100” — and producing canvases steadily through the 1970s. Wesselmann continued to turn out nudes (though under different titles) until his death in 2004 at 73.
It’s quite a franchise. The pictures’ gestalt: a woman’s torso broadly drawn, few distinguishing characteristics other than pyramidal nipples, deep bikini tan lines and a mouth straight off a Colgate ad. The artist nestled these nudes in boldly colored interiors decked out with tokens of Americana. If you can imagine a soft-core comic book issued by the U.S. government, you’ll get a visual.
At the Kreeger, studies in charcoal and pencil on paper, cut board or canvas reveal Wesselmann perfecting his kitschy subject. The pictures are exuberant and often very funny. A study drawing for nude torsos is pockmarked by nipples and breasts cantilevering at various angles as Wesselmann worked out how to render female anatomy with maximum visual velocity.
A generous take on the artist’s devotion to his subject is that these pictures were sly metaphors for post-World War II excess. His titles’ cheeky link to the legacy of the Great American Novel, that epitome of the zeitgeist, advances that theory.
Yet Wesselmann’s choice of subject complicates that read. The nude runs deep in art history, dating to the Greeks and repeated by everyone from Titian to Manet on down. But the essence of pop, as practiced by Warhol or Lichtenstein, was brasher: the shocking elevation of the everyday, the heroization of the disposable. Look around the Kreeger and you’ll see that Wesselmann owed more to Matisse than to the 1960s avant-garde.
How, then, can we hail Wesselmann as a major force in a movement that he himself only half-embraced?
If Wesselmann’s embrace of pop was half-hearted, the movement’s arbiters felt much the same about him.
Wesselmann missed out on the Pasadena Art Museum’s seminal 1962 exhibition “New Painting of Common Objects,” the first museum show of American pop art and a defining moment for the genre.
Inclusion in that Walter Hopps-curated show didn’t guarantee a place in the popular history, of course. (Joe Goode, anyone?) But in retrospect, the molten core of pop was formed here and a movement seeped from it, satirizing and celebrating the country’s consumerist mores in its wake. Warhol. Lichtenstein. Ed Ruscha. Wayne Thiebaud.
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