Tom Wesselmann (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1931 – New York, New York, 2004) fused the female nude, the commercial still life, and the literal object into a single pictorial space, embedding real radios, telephones, and windowsills alongside painted and collaged elements until the boundary between depicted image and actual thing became genuinely difficult to locate.

Wesselmann began studying psychology at the University of Cincinnati before serving in the army from 1951 to 1954; drawing cartoons to pass the time convinced him to pursue art professionally once his tour ended. After the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he enrolled at Cooper Union in New York, where the prevailing style of gestural abstraction left him cold. "I am interested in assembling a situation resembling painting, rather than painting," he later said of the small collages he began making around 1959, incorporating real advertisements, product packaging, and, in works like Great American Nude #54, an actual radio built into the canvas beneath a painted tabletop.