Art Review : Surveying Phases of Wesselmann’s Work

For years, Tom Wesselmann’s work has made people itch. This is particularly true of the “Great American Nude” series, produced on and off throughout the 1960s. These painted and collaged pieces feature sprawls of female flesh rendered flat like pink wallpaper, if hardly as innocuous. Girls come equipped with packs of Salems, bottles of Coca-Cola and American flags, all part of a fantasy that is more consumerist than sexist, although it is certainly both.

At Fred Hoffman Fine Art, a survey of Wesselmann’s work from 1959 to the present suggests that the artist’s work of the 1960s is more provocative than his reputation allows. The earliest pieces are quite delicate, if somewhat academic, with their tiny fragments of contemporary advertising, painterly surfaces and art historical references.

By the middle of the decade, Wesselmann perfected the trademark Pop wallop--colliding imagery of every imaginable scale, explosive color and proof positive of the seductiveness of everyday life. A 1963 still life, for example, boasts an improbably luscious apple (a reproduction pasted onto a painted image of a bowl) and a hyper-realist saltshaker, whose facets sparkle like diamonds.

The more recent works, however, are dreadful. Owing too much--and at the same time, not enough--to Frank Stella, these layered, cut-out, painted aluminum pieces boast a crudity that even Wesselmann, when he was trying to be crude, couldn’t muster. While these weirdly 3-D landscapes, abstractions and nudes complicate any effort to redeem Wesselmann’s oeuvre, they shouldn’t foil it. Perhaps it’s only a phase.

* Fred Hoffman Fine Art, 1721 Stewart St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3330, through April 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.