Pop Forever
At Fondation Louis Vuitton, guest curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer have taken an unprecedented approach to highlighting one of the most famed artistic movements of the twentieth century. Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & … foregrounds the late American artist Tom Wesselmann, whose outsize influence on the Pop Art movement has historically been sidelined by mainstream discourse. On view until 24 February 2025, Pop Forever presents a holistic survey of Pop Art from its Dada origins to its contemporary resonances. It comprises 150 works by Wesselmann, in addition to 70 pieces by 35 artists spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Wesselmann’s deliciously vivid works– all of which practically pulsate thanks to their chromatic intensity– dissolve the boundaries between sculpture and painting, high and low culture, spectacle and reality. They’re time capsules, too, at once testaments to and subtle criticisms of a bygone era in American history marked by the deification of commerce. ( Pop Forever subtly probes whether that era is really behind us, and the inclusion of modern media– news clips and contemporary works commissioned on the occasion of the show– complicates the distinction between then and now. )
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wesselmann had a lifelong love affair with the trappings of post-war Americana– fast food, erotica, television, and advertising amongst them. Before pivoting to painting, the artist pursued a career as a cartoonist, and prior to that, as a student at the Cooper Union in New York City, he took interest in assemblage, collage, and hybridized images. These influences persist in his mature paintings; Wesselmann’s large scale works retain a provocative, playful quality that calls back to his print media years. The incorporation of sound, light, and video into his larger-than-life works, as evidenced by the Still Life and Smoker series, invites viewers to engage with the familiar mediums in a manner that transcends traditional modes of perception. Wesselmann is particularly adept at rendering familiar motifs, mediums, and themes unfamiliar, bizarre, even revelatory, from the female nude to the domestic interior. The still life, historically quite intimate in terms of both scale and subject matter, becomes striking, even aggressive when executed at a monumental scale.
Wesselmann hasn’t enjoyed a spotlight of this magnitude until now; the primacy of his work in Pop Forever both sheds new light on a ubiquitous movement and recontextualizes pieces that the larger public might be more familiar with. (For example, Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, the most expensive 20th century artwork ever purchased at auction, is on view alongside a slew of equally formidable Pop Art icons. And yet one leaves the exhibition touched most profoundly by Wesselmann’s strange, sensual work.) Interspersed between groupings of Wesselmann’s series ( Great American Nude Series, Smoker Series, Still Lifes ), works by some of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, assert that he deserves comparable celebrity status. It’s difficult not to be enamored, or at the least entertained, by Pop Forever. The artist’s works, akin to but very much distinct from those of his contemporaries, interpolate and exaggerate the shiny symbols of twentieth century consumerism at gargantuan scales. Wesselmann’s prolific oeuvre is varied, but each alluring series presented in succession reveals a sustained interest, in the words of Fondation LV, in the “sensuality and eroticism of American life.”
