Seascape #16

Seascape #16 is a vintage Tom Wesselmann Pop Art painting from 1966. The 1960s were a vital time for Wesselman, who explored a staggering number of possibilities in different media, subject matter and variations on his most popular subject:the female nude. Athough critics have often pointed to the prurient aspects of his work, his subject matter follows a long line of artists who have made the sensuous female nude their raison d'être. Indeed, his early nudes of women in bath tubs are much more indebted to Bonnard's late paintings than to any of his American contemporaries.

One of Wesselmann's early influences was de Kooning. "I wanted to paint like de Kooning, but I couldn't...it wasn't my language. But I was so excited by the ideas of de Kooning that I was determined to find my own way" (as quoted in S. Hunter, Tom Wesselmann, 1994, p. 16). Rather than realize nudes in an abstract expressionist manner, Wesselmann realized them in a flatly painted, graphic style that references the billboards that dominated the 1960s skyline.

Wesselmann created a series of works in the mid-1960s that are cropped images of female anatomy, which serves to give the composition a bold abstract quality, as well as fetishizing the body part. The contours of the breast and horizon are meticulously realized in subtly gradated tones, which cause the forms to fluctuate in the eye, adding an Op-Art effect. The breast form appears to float, looming over the landscape in a dramatic juxtaposition of image and its background and is reminiscent of Magritte's penchant for enigmatic disembodied images.

"From the mid-1960s to 1970, Wesselmann moved towards a much more expansive scale, with less cluttered internal elements, and often deployed sculpted shapes and broadly rendered body fragments and interior vistas. His imagery was defined with a new economy and force in distinct color shapes as he reached out towards an even more monumental scale, and associated his striking formal qualities of flatness, frontality and repetition with many aspects of the best abstract painting and "primary structures" that dominated late sixties art in New York" (Ibid, p. 25).