Word: wesselmann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...generation of artists painted what they saw, rejecting abstractions and bucolic panoramas in favor of the edgy cityscapes of the new age. The exhibit opens with a monumental oil and collage by American Tom Wesselmann depicting a towering six-pack of Royal Crown Cola, a fat loaf of Sunbeam bread and a can of Libby's beef stew obscuring a view of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral. That jarring juxtaposition embodies a fundamental tenet of Pop: that the everyday artifacts of consumer society defined a new aesthetic, stretching traditional conceptions of appropriate subjects and blurring the distinction between high...
...reflected on the surface of passing cars and wet asphalt. Rudy Burckhardt's photograph of an enormous Coca-Cola billboard dwarfing pedestrians on the street below is a masterpiece of black and white composition. Nor did the pop generation shrink from taking on the most traditional of subjects. In Wesselmann's Great American Nude No. 54, a painted female form sprawls beside a 3-D radiator, a telephone and a table adorned with ice cream sundaes - a reminder that this was the era of hedonism and sexual revolution, in which the human body also became a consumer object...