Blue Nude Drawing

Revisiting his most iconic subject, Tom Wesselmann’s Blue Nude Drawing displays the highly stylized nude figures of the artist’s earlier work, while at the same time revealing an evolution in his inimitably sensuous style. Wesselmann began painting dynamic, Pop-inflicted depictions of female nudes during his formative years in his Great American Nudes series of the 1960s. While infusing his compositions with modern fantasies of sexual power and beauty, Wesselmann developed his unique personal style in dialogue with art historical icons, such as the odalisques of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Henri Matisse. Dynamically positioned within a tight composition, the unabashedly naked muse of Wesselmann’s Blue Nude Drawing pays a particularly powerful homage to Edouard Manet’s Olympia. Drawing from his predecessors, “Wesselmann’s nudes function as visual correlatives that transfer the sexual charge from the icon of the odalisque to our experience of the painting itself” (B. London, Tom Wesselmann, exh. cat., Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, 2004, p. 6). A quintessential example of the artist’s lifelong fascination with nature’s beauty, the present work captures the mature phase of the artist’s evolution towards a more refined, fluid, and abstracted style. Devoid of most identifying features, save for her lips, nipples, and flowing blond hair, the anonymous nude symbolizes a contemporary adaptation of traditional muses. With a bold use of color, line, and space, the elements of this composition create a tension that simultaneously composes and destabilizes the body of the nude. The meandering lines of this composition work to signify the contours of the muse’s sultry curves, while also transforming her form into an abstracted dance of arabesques. With its sophisticated and seductive tension between figuration and abstraction, Blue Nude Drawing exudes Wesselman’s confidence and freedom in painting at the culmination of his artistic development.