Tom Wesselmann
Great American Nudes with no faces, assembled from advertising, real objects and flat colour.
Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati in 1931 and began as a cartoonist. The Great American Nude series, started in 1961, reduces the figure to flat unmodelled colour with the face erased and only the mouth, nipples and hair rendered, set in interiors assembled from real objects — working televisions, radiators, telephones, actual bathroom fittings — and cut advertising imagery. The Smokers and the shaped Standing Still Lifes followed, and in the 1980s he began cutting drawings out of laser-cut steel and aluminium. He resisted the Pop label all his life and died in 2004.
Assemblages incorporating real domestic objects and functioning appliances are conservation cases, since the objects age, corrode and stop working, and replacement is a live question that affects value. The Great American Nudes lead the market. The laser-cut metal drawings of the 1980s and later are editioned as well as unique, and the two must be distinguished carefully. There is a substantial print output in screenprint and lithograph, published in editions of around a hundred, where flat colour makes fading immediately apparent.
If you own a work by Tom Wesselmann
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.