Curated by Danilo Eccher

Tom Wesselmann began his career with a joke too good to go unpunished. When he began painting his stylized odalisques in the early ’60s, he called them Great American Nudes—of which, at that time, if one excepts Eakins’s nubile boys, there were exactly none. Unfortunately, Wesselmann’s insistence that our experience of modern art is grounded in eros and intimacy would be sneered away by the “isms” of the ’70s, along with his American vogue. It is altogether appropriate, then, that this thematic survey of some thirty canvases and free-standing works (most made since 1987) is being mounted in Rome, where, at least, his gorgeous odalisques, smokers, and ravishing oranges will participate in a cosmopolitan discourse that accommodates itself to vanitas and desire.

— Dave Hickey