Tom Wesslemann Tom Wesslemann

Artist, Tom Wesslemann Studios, Inc.
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, New York
Fine Arts, 1959

Tom Wesselmann stayed in New York City because it offered him everything he was looking for - museums, galleries, and young artists eager to present their work.

Tom Wesselmann came to The Cooper Union with one notion, and left with a whole different set of ideas.

During an oral history with Irving Sandler in 1984, Mr. Wesselmann, one of the founders of the Pop Art movement, said that he came to New York City from his hometown of Cincinnati to become a cartoonist. During his time in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s, he began to draw cartoons; in 1956, he was accepted into The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a college which admits undergraduates solely on merit and awards all full scholarships. At art school, his perceptions began to change, becoming more complex and finer-tuned.

In speaking with Sandler, Mr. Wesselmann continued, “I taught myself to draw cartoons, and the art school I viewed as a completely different phenomenon. It had nothing to do with cartooning... and then going to Cooper Union and encountering students who were all oriented toward art and a little bit precocious from that point of view. They tended to think and examine their values...”

By the time he graduated, Mr. Wesselmann was a painter who was destined to make a decided mark on the world. In his talk with Mr. Sandler, he also pointed out that at The Cooper Union, “teachers were talking about the importance of not accepting — because they were aware of what was happeningin the art world; it was the Fifties — The Abstract Expressionists, the New York School was rising, and there was a lot of excitement about it. The whole premise of that in a large part was to not accept what had come before it, but to be open to something new.”

Tom Wesselmann was open to something new. He stayed in New York City because it offered him everything he was looking for – museums, galleries, and young artists eager to present their work. And he offered New York a fresh perspective: along with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann is considered by American art historian Lucy Lippard as one of the five “hard-core” New York pop artists.

He has had numerous exhibits and is represented in museum collections around the world. In New York, his work can be found at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

Like the man, his work is never obvious. When you go to a Wesselmann show, you may start out with a set idea of what it’s all about, but you leave with a whole different set of impressions.