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Wesselmann Tom, *1931 2004 (Cincinnati, Ohio) Worked with painting, collage and prints. Great American Nude,1969 Screenprint, 58 x 73 cm © 2007, Pro Litteris, Zurich The leitmotif in Tom Wesselmann’s oeuvre is the provocative female nude, a choice of subject matter that addresses a central theme of American society: the cult of stars and sex that informs the world of advertising. The Great American Nudes series led to his breakthrough as an artist. The typical subject is a highly stylized faceless blonde in banal situations: lying in bed, holding a lit filter-tipped cigarette or drying herself off in the shower. Tom Wesselmann’s aesthetics of sterile eroticism inverts the tradition of the nude female figure as the embodiment of beauty and turns it into a blatantly decorative object. |