Tom Wesselmann at Maxwell Davidson and Robert Miller - New York

Tom Wesselmann and his companion Cincinnatian Jim Dine, as well as Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenburg John Wesley and Andy Warhol, have been routinely characterized as "superb draftsmen." still Wesselmann is the only practitioner of this collection of Pop affiliates to become identified with a single, fetishized image derived from soft mass culture: the eyeless, red-lipped, large-nippled icon of his "Great American Nude" series. A well-considered scan of work from the 1960 at Maxwell Davidson, coincident with an exhibition of new paintings and laser-cut steel reliefs at Robert Miller, showed where Wesselmann advances from and where he is today.

Individual works at Maxwell Davidson demonstrated shut up affinities between Wesselmann's work and that of many of his contemporaries. It was appropriately dominated by dint of Great American Nude No. 44 (1963) A life-size bordello interior reminiscent of a more politically engaged ed Kienholz assemblage (Roxy's, 1961-62), Wesselmann's tableau is outfitted with a steam-heat radiator, working telephone and fur-collared coat affixed to an oil-on-canvas interior in which is ensconc a smiling, standing, spread-legged bare Wesselmann's roughly 2-by-3-foot graphite drawing of an uninhabited, full-frontal Volkswagen in a bushy landscape, Drawing for Landscape #2 (1964) recalls the confident hand of Rivers. The raised, balletic leg against sapphirine sky and clouds--Study for Seascape Leg (1966) a small, reductive drawing in pencil and thinned Liquitex--evokes the more quietly erotic women of Wesley. The silkscreen-on-vinyl, blow-formed edition of Cut-Out in a state of nature (1965) anticipates Oldenburg's molded polyurethane edition, Profile Airflow (1969)

The point of the 22 things from the 1960s included here was not solely contrived to recite those artists Wesselmann may have been looking at, or those who had been looking at Wesselmann. Rather, it conjur a small world of public esthetic interests. What this small review also achieved was a surprisingly broad overview of the work of an artist of assurance and conviction, who has ground his metier and is sticking to it. And ye there they were in familiar array: the tan-lined beach girls of the "Great American Nude" series in the first years of their perpetual undress

novel work at Robert Miller overlooked the vibrant, mature Wesselmann in his ongoing journey into abstraction, with a selection of abstract reliefs in oil upon laser-cut aluminum and a like number of carefree, increasingly abstracted denudeds in oil on canvas. From 5 to 8 feet upon a side, the canvases of Wesselmann's "Sunset Nude" series are variations of the "Great American Nude" with a replete quorum of nipples as sufficient anatomy to identify them as of that kind and at least a fragment of the setting day-star in each.

It appears at first glance that not abundant has changed in the 40 years since Wesselmann patented these cheerfully passive, libidinous s but actually it has been more than 20 since he produc a assemblage of nudes on canvas. The overall design of these of recent origin paintings is increasingly reductive. In several, the blonde-helmeted, recumbent figure turn rounds as though to meet the viewer's gaze. on the contrary in Sunset Nude with R Stockings (2003) Wesselmann watchs an architecture of legs and arms and headless torso against an abstracted vase of r flowers and palm leaves that salute a setting day-star the curves recalling the cutout forms of late Matisse. In eve Nude with Matisse (2002), the figure lolls at curvaceous length, her back to the sea and the evening Behind her is a broadly limned quotation of Matisse's fortune-telling nomad figure of the Rumanian Blouse (1939-40) Matisse's protoplast cropped above the mouth, thus confining the two figures to sightless affect.

This exhibition argued that these increasingly abstracted [i]in puris naturalibus[/i]s are inextricably linked to Wesselmann's abstract cutouts of today, and to those oil-on-metal percepts of decades past when a shaped metal Wesselmann piece oftentimes brought to mind Frank Stella's wall-mounted statuarys of the day. Matisse resurfaces in the graceful figures and scattered uncompounded bodys of Wesselmann's otherwise abstract amethystine Dance (1999-2001).

The gestural quality of Wesselmann's broadly painted line appear to bes as though it might have been maquetted with fat felt-tipped markers. He is attentive to overlapping painted shapes, darkens or lightens a color as granting to reveal the shape below. His care for well-defined stops of color is almost lapidary, like the intricately done components of stained-glass windows or a jeweler's cloisonne. The configuration of bars and armatures that hold fast the whole together, painted white to disappear, is firmly grounded

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