Greedy lips. Makeuped eyelids. Pink dermis. The flesh-colored work of the American artist Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), which the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is exhibiting from October 17, is identifiable among a thousand, without being recognized for its true value. His frank palette was considered too flashy, his subjects full of desire, too obscene. When the Whitney Museum reopened in a brand new building in 2015, the painter was indeed enthroned in the room dedicated to pop art, a label that he often refuted during his lifetime.
Of all his contemporaries, he is the unloved. “It is nevertheless one of the big three, with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein”argues New York merchant Christophe Van de Weghe. Its prices, however, are light years ahead of its peers. “When a Warhol masterpiece is worth 200 million dollars, Lichtenstein’s top 55 million, a great Wesselmann is 6 million dollars! The price of a young artist of whom we do not know what he will be worth in five years, while Wesselmann is in history! »se désole M. Van de Weghe.
His colleague Emilio Steinberger, one of the directors of the New York gallery Lévy Gorvy, provides the beginning of an explanation: “He produced much less than the other two. For one Wesselmann, there are fifteen Lichtensteins and thirty Warhols. People are reluctant to put it up for sale. As a result, the market is bumpy. » This is partly true, but it is not the only explanation.
Born in 1931 in Ohio, Wesselmann first dreamed of becoming a cartoonist before establishing himself as an artist from 1961 with his series of Great American Nude, a version of which was offered in June by Christophe Van de Weghe at the Art Basel fair for $5.5 million. Even if he also paints men, rods and acorns in close-ups, the woman immediately appears as an obsessive subject, her body demarcated, surrounded, her limbs shattered like a puzzle. Even the frames follow feminine contours. Unlike his pop art comrades, who took their female figures from magazines, he painted models in the flesh. Like Matisse, his absolute reference.
Wesselmann may well be a worthy heir of the French painter, but his nudes fit into a completely different context, the hedonism of sixties and American consumerism. Can of Budweiser, milkshake, 7 Up, hamburger… All the attributes ofAmerican way of life appear in the decor.
Suspicious work
For a long time, Tom Wesselmann’s market was sluggish. The work which excessively fetishizes the mouth, necessarily luscious, the nipples, the pubis or the trace of a bikini, may have seemed repetitive, and worse, suspicious in the eyes of feminists. Wesselmann certainly embraces the sexual revolution: his women are liberated and pleasurable. But devoid of gaze, associated with fruits or flowers like a simple still life, they just seem good to be looked at, women-objects in short.
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