Tom Wesselmann, a prominent Pop artist best known for modernizing the classic female nude into a flat, enigmatic, billboard-friendly silhouette, died Dec. 17 at New York University Medical Center. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications after heart surgery, his wife said.
Along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Jim Dine, Mr. Wesselmann belonged to a generation of artists who gave American art and culture a new sense of itself. They found inspiration, source materials and even working methods in areas beyond art – in advertising, movies, food labels, household appliances, newspaper front pages and in commercial art techniques like silkscreen, Bendaydots and billboard painting. The changes they wrought continue to reverberate through contemporary art and life.
Mr. Wesselmann's sleek, hard-edge, mostly pink silhouettes of reclining female torsos or big cutout lips exhaling clouds of cigarette smoke were distinguished from his fellow Pop artists by a sensuous heat and close-up intimacy that were one part sex and four parts astutely considered color and scale. The images were distant relatives of pinups, filtered through the billboard genre but with a formal infrastructure developed from careful attention to the paintings of de Kooning, Matisse and Mondrian. His goal was an image that was "aggressive," as he once put it, and that he experienced for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958 in front of a large canvas by the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell.
Born in Cincinnati in 1931, Mr. Wesselmann had no interest in art until he was in his 20s. During the Korean War, he was drafted into the Army from college. Resenting the disruption, he redirected an interest in humor into cartooning. Sent to Fort Riley, Kan., to train in aerial photography interpretation, he set about teaching himself to draw.
After the Army, he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. At a teacher's suggestion, he moved to New York in 1956, applied to the tuition-free Cooper Union School of the Arts and was accepted.
He supported himself by selling cartoons to magazines, but gradually shifted his focus to the fine arts. By the late 1950s, he was making large collages from magazine clippings and more rugged materials like cardboard boxes and movie posters scavenged from the streets and subways. But his touchstones were Bonnard's and Matisse's interior images of female nudes, and he soon started calling his own versions Great American Nudes.
In 1961, Mr. Wesselmann met Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Geldzahler looked at his work and recommended it to the painter Alex Katz, who offered Mr. Wesselmann a show at the Tanager Gallery, one of the artists' co-ops on East 10th Street, the center of the Abstract Expressionist painting scene.
Mr. Wesselmann had his next three solo shows at the Green Gallery. After it closed, he joined the Sidney Janis Gallery, whose New Realists exhibition in October 1962 made Pop Art official.
In the 1960s, Mr. Wesselmann expanded on his collages in still lifes and interiors-with-nudes that often combined painted images with real objects, including radios, television sets, refrigerator doors and bathroom fixtures. Perhaps under the influence of other Pop artists, he deliberately eliminated any sign of the painter's hand, preferring the more hard-edged commercial art look. In his "Smokers" series of the 1970s, he zeroed in on the female nude with a series of enormous cutout details: ruby-red lips, manicured fingernails and cigarettes.
Always highly productive, he experimented with materials and techniques and even ventured into sculpture. His considerable gifts as a draftsman were scaled up in a series of landscapes and nudes made of painted, cutout aluminum, a material also employed in abstract reliefs that paid homage to de Kooning. At the time of his death, he was working on a series of nudes painted in an Abstract Expressionist style.
Mr. Wesselmann's most recent New York gallery exhibition was at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea in 2003.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, and a son.
