Throughout his career, Tom Wesselmann looked to the art of Henri Matisse for inspiration. From direct quotations to more allusive innovations, the younger artist maintained a continual dialogue with the modern master.

With his Great American Nudes series of the 1960s, Wesselmann transformed the Matissean odalisque into a pop icon. Thereafter, Matisse’s work remained a central reference in his pursuit of visual intensity and sensory overload. Wesselmann’s works reflect different modes of appropriation: pieces based on Matisse, direct quotations, and, more profoundly, a Matissean conception of colour and surface.

In the Great American Nudes series, begun in 1961, Wesselmann advanced this process of assimilation in increasingly sophisticated ways. He was particularly drawn to the French artist’s treatment of the nude—more precisely, the female figure in a domestic interior imbued with a heightened eroticism. The series thus presents itself as an Americanisation of the Western tradition of the nude, in which a Matissean archetype is transposed into the cultural context of the 1960s.

In the 1970s, Wesselmann continued to explore the ideas and media that had preoccupied him during the previous decade. Most notably, his large Standing Still Life series—composed of freestanding shaped canvases—depicted small, intimate objects on a monumental scale. In 1980, under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth, he wrote an autobiography documenting the evolution of his artistic practice. He also continued to develop shaped canvases (first exhibited in the 1960s) and began creating works in metal.

In his final years, he returned to the female form in the Sunset Nudes series of oil paintings. Their bold compositions, abstract imagery, and sanguine moods often recall Matisse’s odalisques.

In spring 2023, the Musée Matisse in Nice presented the exhibition Tom Wesselmann After Matisse. Featuring forty-one works, it explored the many ways in which Wesselmann expressed his admiration for Matisse—from his first collages in 1959 to his final works in the Sunset Nudes series of the 2000s.