Between Matisse and Playboy: Tom Wesselmann and the female body

Abstract

Considered by several critics a vulgarization of high culture, the work of Tom Wesselmann outcomes, on the contrary, from a tense dialogue with history of art and the productions of mass communication. Making use of cultivated references – Pierre- Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse – and of icons produced by mass communication, mainly Playboy magazine and advertising, the artist looks critically at a phenomenon like voyeurism, that he analyses in two mechanisms: sexual fragmentation and nudity. The different strategies used by Wesselmann contradict the idealizations forged by history of art and mass culture and bring the observer face to face with the desires and the obsessions that rule his relationship with woman’s figures.

keywords: Wesselmann; painting; mass communication.