"Monica Lying on Blanket", 1988

Wesselmann came to fame in the 1960s with his "Great American Nude" series. The nude female body remained a recurring motif in his oeuvre. In his "Bedroom Paintings" he developed it further and began to focus on details such as hands, feet and breasts, which he surrounded with flowers and objects. In a further step, he reduced the scene to a few outlines, at the same time bringing it closer to the foreground. The cut-out works began with Wesselmann's original idea to preserve the process and immediacy of his drawings, including the false lines or errors, and to transfer them to steel. He called them 'steel drawings'. The main motifs of these works are the same that preoccupied him since the 1950s - nudes, still lifes and landscapes. However, from the beginning he was mainly interested in the form and presentation of the image, which caused a constant change and development in his work. With his works in cut-out steel, Tom Wesselmann has made a great contribution to intensifying the image by way of the form.