"I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months"

Wesselmann rejects the posture of the poet-artist, signaling a break from the aura of mystique and lyric profundity that had dominated mid-century American art. The remark reads as a declaration of method: abandon metaphor, strip away the romance of ineffable meaning, and commit to the immediacy of looking. Rather than traffic in coded symbolism or literary suggestion, he amplifies the visual charge of the everyday, lipstick, cigarettes, sliced oranges, radios, the nude, flattened, enlarged, and clarified until they vibrate with presence.

“Getting rid of poetry” marks a refusal of Abstract Expressionism’s heroic subjectivity and painterly rhetoric. He substitutes crisp contours, billboard scale, and commercial color for the gestural, the atmospheric, and the confessional. Collage, cut-outs, shaped canvases: these are tools for making images operate as objects rather than verses, events rather than narratives. Meaning arises not from metaphor but from the friction of forms, temperature of color, edge against edge, scale against expectation. The work asks to be seen before it is explained.

The aside about “a few months” is telling. It implies an early trial of lyrical ambitions quickly discarded, suggesting a pragmatic studio ethic and a decisive temperament. The commitment is to clarity and sensual precision: economy of means, maximum optical impact. His nudes are not allegories; they are engineered experiences of desire and American appetite, designed with the cool logic of advertising yet sharpened by rigorous composition.

There is, however, a paradox at the heart of the stance. By renouncing poetry as a mode of expression, he discovers another kind of lyricism, one that lives in scale, surface, and the charged silence between objects. The work’s intensity comes from refusing to pretend to be literature. Eye before language; sensation before sentiment. In that exchange, he finds a blunt, lucid, and distinctly modern eloquence.