Tom Wesselmann

Has there ever been an artist as proficient at rendering the erect nipple as Tom Wesselman? It’s doubtful. But then, if Wesselman (1931–2004) was the Pop Art Da Vinci of engorged mammary tissue, it’s probably because he was the only postwar painter to have pursued the subject with such determination. However, as this first retrospective of his work since his death attests, Wesselman also depicted other talismans of the American good life after World War II with a kind of  languor more typical of Matisse or Vuillard than his Pop Art contemporaries.