Elga Wimmer
Designed by Frank Gehry, the Paris based Louis Vuitton Foundation with its soaring glass and steel architecture spanning several floors, is the ideal venue for this impressive exhibition of 1960’s through early 2000’s paintings and multi-media work by Tom Wesselmann (1931 – 2024). Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann & …, which runs from October 17, 2024, through February 24, 2025, includes, in addition to Wesselmann’s, art by thirty-five contemporary artists that give context to the show, tracing its Dadaist roots.
These include such notable artists as Derrick Adams, Ai Weiwei, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Mickalene Thomas, Andy Warhol, Marisol, and Marjorie Strider. The show’s curators, Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, set out to prove that Pop’s influence continues to be felt around the world, across all generations.
A quintessential art movement of the mid-century (though rooted in the 1920’s0 Pop reveres objects used in everyday life and in commercial advertising. Not outwardly a political movement, it nevertheless overthrew traditional movements in art history of the 20th Century, inadvertently contributing to a political dialogue. That dialogue included reproductions, in paintings and sculptures of objects associated with the middle class, echoing the surrealists’ association with socialism.
The Pop movement was global from the start, as seen in the exhibition The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern in 2015/2016. From Eastern Europe to Argentina, from France to Japan, the Pop influence was everywhere at once. That exhibition, curated by Jessica Morgan, Director at Dia Art Foundation, New York, included artists of all backgrounds.
In this regard, Morgan took care to showcase many female artists, formerly not given much notice in the Pop art movement such as Marta Menujin, Nicola L., Kiki Kugelnik, Martha Rosler, Delia Cancela, Beatriz Gonzales and Anna Maria Maiolina.
Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann & … shows that Pop is much more than a visual language to celebrate Western consumerism, as it is sometimes dismissed. Rather, it alludes to objects that cross class barriers and elevates objects used by the middle class to the realm of art, much as Duchamp did for Dada, gaining access to the art world by those who can identify with its portrayals.
Tom Wesselmann’s work presented here ranges from the early delicate drawings to his huge installations, offering up a de facto retrospective, spanning an entire career of some fifty years. We see the Dadaist roots of Pop art, in works by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, a precursor to Wesselmann’s first collages in 1959. In chronological order the exhibition leads us from the Great American Nude of the 1960’s, to the large-scale embossed Standing Still Lifes and Landscapes (1970’s), which lie on the fringe of abstraction, to the Sunset Nudes (2003/2004). From an art historical perspective, his work is more conservative than others who work in the Pop genre. He focused on the female nude — a centuries old tradition — while other Pop artists would provocatively repurpose the American flag, soup cans, comic strips. At the same time, Wesselmann’s work is more universal, not relegated to images from US life, expanding the audience for POP in general and his work in particular.
Whereas the female nude was often depicted as a passive object of desire in art history, Wesselmann’s nudes are unabashedly erotic, powerful, and sexy, predating the feminist era and the unabashedly sexual, female figures of women artists including Lisa Yuskasavage. The Mouth (1968), Smoker (1973) and Mouth#14 (Marylin) were deemed shocking in their day.
His Great American Nude series was greatly inspired by De Kooning’s women. Whereas De Kooning’s women exude a joyless cynicism, Wesselmann celebrates women. His Starry Night Nude (1959) hints at the influence of Matisse and Van Gogh.
The artist’s wife Claire would often model, and the viewer can witness her identity morph seamlessly between model, muse, wife, fellow artist and creative coconspirator. Both Claire and Tom Wesselmann studied art at New York’s Cooper Union in the late 1950s.
The term, Pop art, coined in 1955 by the British scholar and art critic, Lawrence Alloway, references a glorified popular culture that elevates common, unremarkable objects, and themes, to iconic status. This is as true now, as it was then.