Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, known for his large-scale paintings that mix elements of fine art and advertising and for his compositions in which classically posed nudes vie for attention with household appliances and product labels, died Friday. He was 73.
A longtime resident of New York, he died at New York University Medical Center after complications from heart surgery, according to Emilio Steinberger of the Robert Miller Gallery, where Mr. Wesselmann recently exhibited his work.
Rising to prominence in the 1960s with Pop artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, Mr. Wesselmann brought the flat quality of cartoons and the giant scale of billboards to his work. He also populated his canvases with mass-produced objects in the Pop tradition, but he added to his paintings what critics referred to as a lush sensuality.
Two images became his signatures: a series of paintings of vast female nudes with candy red lips in the 1960s and another series of just red lips, some dangling a cigarette or releasing a cloud of smoke.
Mr. Wesselmann also made sculpture, combining the same hard-edged surfaces and intimate subjects of his paintings. One sculpture, “Belt Still Life” (1982), made of painted wood, consists of a man’s belt, a woman’s shoe and a vase of tulips.
Born in Cincinnati in 1931, Mr. Wesselmann was drafted into the Army during the Korean War and later attended Cooper Union School of Art in New York. Throughout most of his student years he planned to become a cartoonist. But, inspired by Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning–in particular the series of large, pink nudes de Kooning painted in the 1940s and ’50s–Mr. Wesselmann revised his plans.
Several exhibits of his paintings in the early ’60s established him as a founding member of the Pop Art movement.
In recent years, however, Mr. Wesselmann startled critics with paintings that recalled the Abstract Expressionist style that had prompted the smooth-surfaced paintings of Pop Art. For example, a 1996 exhibit in New York featured wall reliefs made of cutout metal, painted in broad gestural strokes of deep blue, green and brown.
More recently he returned to fleshy nudes in a similarly expressive painting style, quite different from the plastic-smooth surfaces of his earlier works.
