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With “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” the Parisian foundation exhibits numerous figures of pop art, and above all the American painter whose works in palettes of lipstick, canary yellow and candy pink constantly overflow their borders.
Wesselmann considered, he states in his autobiography published at the end of the 1970s, not to belong to any “category”. No one ever wanted to believe it. And it is not now that he is dead (in 2004, at age 73) that art history will change its mind. Nor the Vuitton Foundation, which makes the American artist the heart of “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” But not the only master on board since the exhibition also includes leading figures of pop art (Jasper Johns), figures left behind by the history of art (Kiki Kogelnik) and then contemporaries who continue to cultivate shapes and palette, pop iconography, without forgetting the Dadaist beginnings. That makes people into pop music. A little too much. Especially since Wesselmann’s works, largely in the majority, crush the competition and, from his point of view, cannot be reduced to this label. Which, however, was not attributed to him without his knowledge.
In 1961, it was in an exhibition “New Realists”, planting the beginnings of the movement, that he hung his first paintings, at the same time as Warhol and Lichtenstein. And, in the rooms of the Foundation, it is obvious. Wesselmann’s works seem to tick all the boxes: lipstick palette, canary yellow, bubblegum pink and a thousand saturated hues; the patterns taken off the supermarket shelves, the bottles of 7 Up, the cans of Budweiser, the packets of cigarettes; the girls from the magazines, the star-spangled banner… And the pan
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