Word: wesselmann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...
Painter Tom Wesselmann, like de Kooning before him, has refused to choose sides in the controversy between abstract expressionism and the new realism. Instead, his female nudes, often in monumental proportions, inhabit both schools. The results of his energetic production are collected in the 200 pictures-100 in high-intensity color-in Tom Wesselmann (Abbeville; 321 pages; $75). The artist's huge women are usually blank idealizations adrift in mundane rooms, like the fantasies of adolescent boys. Others display explicit but deadpan eroticism among billboard-style oranges and ashtrays. Always provocative, usually amusing and sometimes shocking, Wesselmann...