Post War and Contemporary Art featuring A Vision in Color: A Curated Session by Emily Friedman

We thank the Estate of Tom Wesselmann for assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:

Green Gallery, New York.

Acquired from the above in 1962

Thence by familial descent

Tom Wesselmann’s Little Great American Nude #10, 1961, exemplifies his pioneering approach to the representation of the female form in postwar American art. This oil and collage on panel, part of his Great American Nude series, is both intimate in scale and audacious in subject, reflecting Wesselmann’s bold embrace of sensuality, American iconography, and the visual language of popular culture.

Emerging in the early 1960s alongside contemporaries such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann was a key figure in the Pop Art movement, though his work diverged through its overt eroticism and painterly lushness. In Little Great American Nude #10, a reclining female figure is rendered in flat swathes of pinks and reds, surrounded by domestic details such as patterned wallpaper, fruit, and a mirror. The figure operates simultaneously as an object of desire and as a symbol - both critiquing and celebrating postwar American ideals of femininity, beauty, and comfort. The integration of cultural markers, including a flag-inspired curtain and campy décor, firmly situates the nude within a distinctly American context, reflecting Wesselmann’s fascination with the consumerist American dream and its imagery.

The Great American Nude series - particularly early, smaller works like this - redefined traditional depictions of the nude in art. Rather than shying away from sexuality, Wesselmann embraced it fully, transforming the body into a bold, stylized emblem of American culture. In doing so, he both acknowledged the conventions of the Western art tradition and simultaneously disrupted them.