Wesselmann and his New York art pals were like a hive mind, dipping into pop culture in their work in a surprisingly uniform, straight-faced reaction to the angry, angsty aesthetics of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Even though he never felt comfortable with the Pop artist label himself, Wesselmann’s still lifes appeared in the first major group show in New York devoted to Pop Art (called New Realism in those days). Almost immediately the Europeans caught onto the movement, and Wesselmann’s works became de rigueur in the shows there. For the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, Wesselmann offered a 10-foot mouth, wide open and lipstick red.  Then, all of a sudden, it was like he was the fifth Beatle — a moment in history. Although collectors continued to buy his work throughout his life, the spotlight had shifted and early supporters began abandoning him. The curator Henry Geldzahler, one of his earliest champions, left him out of his landmark show, “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970,” the Metropolitan Museum’s maiden foray into contemporary art. Lawrence Alloway, the British critic widely credited with coining the term Pop Art, afforded Wesselmann only a token presence in his 1974 Whitney Museum survey of Pop. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a few feminist critics made Wesselmann the whipping boy for the male gaze, but more damaging was the unwillingness of American museums to show the nudes. In the wake of the obscenity trial that haunted the Robert Mapplethorpe show in the ’90s, curators treated his brand of wholesome eroticism as if it was an advertisement for unprotected sex.  Wesselmann’s reaction to the silence was typically industrious: He published a richly illustrated critical appreciation of his own work, with the help of one of his earliest collectors, the publisher Harry N. Abrams, with text he wrote himself under the delightfully silly pseudonym Slim Stealingworth. (As Slim, he wrote, “Wesselmann was aware of a relationship between scale and eroticism. Too big a scale and eroticism decreases — perhaps because it is too hard to relate to a 15-foot woman.”) It’s still the most useful book on the painter, and a primer for working artists on cheerful, relentless, slightly ironic reinvention.  Oddly enough, he thrived throughout the decades of disregard, calling the period the happiest and most rewarding of his life. While he was completing the last of his “Great American Nude” series, he invented several remarkable genres. The first he called “Drop-Out” paintings, after an advertising term. They’re masterpieces of intimacy — shaped canvases depicting, say, a seascape, a bedside tableau or even a self-portrait, with edges that trace the outline of a naked woman (her leg, arm, stomach, breast), and only a nipple in the painted portion. The nudity is domestic, not libidinous, somewhere between Bonnard’s glowing portraits of his wife at her bath and the idle vacation nudity of Éric Rohmer’s films from the mid-1970s.  Wesselmann also pioneered a method of turning drawings into laser-cut steel, so that his quick, sure-handed sketches from life could be turned into something solid. “It is really like being able to pick up a delicate line drawing from the paper,” he wrote later. The painter Eric Fischl, who visited Wesselmann’s second floor studio on Bowery in the ’80s, remembers spotting the steel-cut works and being jealous. But much as he wanted to try it out, he never did because Tom “owns that technique completely.”  In 1993, Wesselmann suffered a heart attack, and after this brush with mortality, he brought Claire out of retirement and returned to his defining subject. In the resulting series, the “Sunset Nudes,” his forms are extremely simplified — thick pink outlines and dropout whites compete for attention, the figure flickering between slim youth and Cycladic figurine, with the rest of his bright forms (flowers, the patterns of a chair) reduced almost to insignia. His career-­long admiration for the work of a French master plays out in one of his last paintings, “Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque,” from 2003, the year before his death. The blond figure raises her arms over her head in an echo of a 1923 Matisse nude that Wesselmann tucked in the corner above her. “One upshot of the heart attack is that it has brought Claire and I to an intense closeness,” he wrote in his journal. “I’m wildly in love with Claire.”  A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016, on page M2154 of T Magazine with the headline: The Wholesome Eroticism of Tom Wesselmann. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Tom Wesselmann’s paintings alienated some in the ’70s and ’80s, but his wholesome eroticism looks remarkably fresh today.