Cut-Out Nude

"Cut-Out Nude" is a 1965 blow-formed screenprinted vinyl by Tom Wesselmann that demonstrates the American Pop artist's most sculptural and technically experimental mode, the image showing a female nude rendered in three-dimensional form with the same bold, graphic vocabulary that characterized his two-dimensional paintings. The composition is a small sculpture—20 × 41 centimeters—showing a nude figure in relief with the blow-formed vinyl creating a surface of extraordinary plasticity and graphic clarity, the three-dimensional form suggesting both the physical presence of the body and the commercial aesthetic of the advertising sign. The 1965 date places this work in the same period as the "Great American Nude" paintings, suggesting that Wesselmann was exploring the same themes in multiple media and scales, each variation offering a different perspective on the theme of the female nude in American culture. Art historians have compared this sculpture to the cut-outs of Matisse and the reliefs of the Constructivists, noting that Wesselmann's treatment is more focused on the commercial style and the Pop vocabulary, the transformation of the artistic tradition into a consumer product, than the formal invention or the spiritual aspiration of these other traditions.

This 1965 vinyl sculpture made Pop nude three-dimensionally commercial through small 20cm blow-formed plasticity graphic relief and advertising-sign physical presence, using sculptural experiment to translate painting vocabulary into consumer-product form beyond Matisse spiritual cut-out.

It matters because Wesselmann blew a nude into vinyl and made the plastic feel like it was posing for a billboard—proving that even a sculpture could be an ad if the screenprint was bold enough.