In the galaxy of American pop artists, the notoriety of Andy Warhol has often eclipsed his rivals, such as Tom Wesselmann, who died in 2004. This hard worker, who preferred the closed doors of his studio to worldly affairs, had no exhibition in France since that, in 1994, of the Fondation Cartier in Jouy-en-Josas.
Another foundation – Vuitton – is putting it back in the spotlight today, through one of those mega-hangings on four levels that it likes. This is good for an artist who has continued to divert advertising images and XXL formats from billboards. Thanks to numerous loans from his beneficiaries, 150 works were brought together, showing the variety of his formal inventions. The curators, Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, compare them with those of around thirty artists, revealing both the sources and the posterity of Wesselmann, as well as his dialogues with the proponents of pop art.
Images of a triumphant America
Stapled on wood or cardboard, his first works assembled, in 1959, in the tradition of Dadaist collages, fabrics, photographs, advertising advertisements and nudes drawn after Bonnard or Matisse. The reference to Now rose of this master, treated in decorative flat areas, is evident in the Great American Nude. Noted by critics since 1961, his creations display the emblems of a triumphant America: the star-spangled banner, a portrait of Kennedy, a view of the Capitol, but also sodas, ice creams and fruits, symbols of a new abundance , in the middle of which an anonymous female body sits enthroned. Like one consumable good among others?
The time is one of sexual liberation, boosted by the contraceptive pill. Wesselmann captures arched, suggestive female models very closely. He zooms in on a foot with carmine nails, a luscious mouth, a fetishized breast. With humor, he shows himself in his Self-portrait drawing (1983), seated in front of a sheet of paper, one eye obscured by a woman’s breast, literally cut out from the painting. Among other of his pop art contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol or Richard Hamilton, the pin-up, even the sex symbol star like Marilyn, also returns as a leitmotif, recalls the exhibition. While showing the critical distance that women artists take on this burning subject, like Rosalyn Drexler who denounces, in Love and Violence (1965), control relationships.
The violence of the world rejected off-camera
Alongside the haunting nudes, the still lifes (Still Life) are Wesselmann’s other major subject. Prepared by numerous drawings, his compositions even integrate real objects or their plastic moldings. Like this “ready-made” urinal exhibited in 1917 in New York by Marcel Duchamp? In his Bathtub collage, the American artist responds with a toilet seat in relief, next to a nude painted in his bathtub. In fact, it is all the modern comforts of a booming consumerist society that he stages in his paintings similar to theater sets: here a Ford mustang, there a radio playing, a red telephone ringing from time to time, elsewhere a refrigerator door in relief, near a table overloaded with images of canned goods and industrial foods. Astonishing portraits of a bulimic nation, where we are yet to talk about carbon footprints or an obesity epidemic… Facing them, precious Chinese vases from the Han dynasty, flanked by the Coca Cola logo by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, denounce the brutality of this American imperialism.
With hindsight, the most disturbing thing about the interior scenes depicted by Wesselman is how much death and violence are thrown off-camera. Her impeccable nudes never get old. In Bedroom Blonde with T.V., Claire, the artist’s wife, sleeps, as if deaf to the television set which, very close to her, evokes “the economic crisis particularly affecting black communities”. Coming from these minorities, the painters Derrick Adams and Mickalene Thomas, invited to the exhibition, did not hold back from reinterpreting these “Glorious American nudes” in their own way.
Everything is perfect, far too perfect, in the individualist Eden where Wesselmann takes refuge. Not fooled, in the 1970s he tried to give a delirious gigantism to his accessories, like this ring, this stick of lipstick and these sunglasses, each painted on a canvas in their shape and assembled in trompe l’oeil. At the dawn of the 2000s, the artist even briefly shifted into abstraction, with assemblages of colored aluminum cutouts. More unreal than ever!
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L’exposition « Pop forever, Tom Wesselmann &… » is held at the Louis-Vuitton Foundation in Paris until February 24. Reservations recommended: Fondationlouisvuitton.fr
The catalogdirected by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, offers, alongside critical texts, interviews with former models of Tom Wesselmann (including director Danièle Thompson) and contemporary artists inspired by his works (Gallimard, 347 p., €45).