Tom WESSELMANN

American　1931 - 2004

Tom Wesselmann was one of the leading American pop artists in the 1960s. His artwork are abundant in bright and vivid colors, those close-up depiction of female figures capture viewers’ attention immediately. While celebrating color and form, the highly stylized figurative artwork with strong composition simultaneously form the impressive imagery. Wesselmann prefer the classical of nude, still life, and landscape paintings instead of Abstract Expressionism which was prevailing since the 1940s. He once said “The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art.”

Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 23, 1931. Due to the draft in 1952, Wesselman joined the US Army for two years. During the service he started to gain interest in creating cartoons which led to the first cartoon work he had ever made. In 1954, after graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a major in psychology, he began to study drawing in Art Academy of Cincinnati. Wesselmann moved to New York in 1956 to study in Cooper Union, by creating art with painting instead of cartoon, he entered the next stage of his artist career. Until his death on December 17, 2004, Wesselmann was as a New York-based artist who was constantly active in the art world.