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©
VEGAP, Madrid
Tom Wesselmann

Nude No. 1

1970
Oil on canvas.
63.5 x 114.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
783
(
1974.53
)
ROOM 52
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Tom Wesselmann was one of the main practitioners of American Pop Art, along with James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein. Although Pop Art made a statement against the heroic aspirations of Abstract Expressionism, Wesselmann never denied that Willem de Kooning’s series of Women had been a permanent reference for him ever since he first set eyes on these works in 1953. Indeed, in 1964 he told the critic Gene Swenson that “De Kooning gave me content and motivation. My work evolves from that.”

At the end of the 1950s Wesselmann began a series of small collages of nudes in interior settings, built from magazine cuttings, which from 1961 provided the iconographic basis for his paintings of the Great American Nudes series. These modern odalisques painted in flat forms and brilliant colours combine models drawn from the tradition of the European nude, such as Manet’s Olympia and the nudes of Matisse or Modigliani, with everyday elements and images pertaining to American popular culture, taken from the cinema, press and television.

The present Nude No. 1, executed in 1970, is structurally similar to the Great American Nudes series and shows a female nude lying across the entire horizontal surface of the canvas in the foreground. By flattening the form of the body against the picture plane, Wesselmann achieves a certain abstract, depersonalised effect that contrasts with the carnal handling of the erogenous zones — pubis, prominent bust and fleshy lips — which, as in most of his compositions, make this painting an allegory of the woman as a sex symbol. The accompanying compositional elements, such as the photographic portrait of the painter, an orange and a vase of red roses, are related to the paintings of the series entitled Bedroom, from previous years. The inclusion of his own portrait has led some scholars to interpret this painting as a self-portrait. The fact that it is positioned next to the female body makes this great American nude an erotic, masturbatory dream.

Paloma Alarcó
20th Centurys. XX - Arte pop en NorteaméricaPaintingOilcanvas
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Nude No. 1. Desnudo nº 1, 1970
Nude No. 1
Tom Wesselmann

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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Nude No. 1. Desnudo nº 1, 1970
Nude No. 1
Tom Wesselmann

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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