There are professional muses, adored by painters and jealous by others. Decades after having set foot on the floor of a workshop, they still attend openings. They remind anyone who will listen of their glorious past, when they posed for a fascinated artist. There are those whom history has confined to the rank of muse even though they were artists themselves. And there are, much rarer, the muses who ignore themselves. Danièle Thompson is one of them.
In November 2023, the French director was in New York and visited the studio, in southern Manhattan, of the painter Tom Wesselmann, who died in 2004 at the age of 73. At the beginning of the 1970s, she posed for him on several occasions. Just like a few other women that the American artist had recruited as models. But that day, Danièle Thompson was treated to a surprise. On a large wall of the studio, now the headquarters of The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, an organization that manages the painter’s work, reproductions of dozens of paintings and drawings representing her were hung. “I didn’t know that he had created so many works based on me, says the 82-year-old filmmaker with a smile. I was amazed to realize that I had, in fact, been so important to him. »
“Danièle Thompson played a crucial role in Tom Wesselmann’s career,” assure Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, guest curators of the vast exhibition that the Louis Vuitton Foundation is dedicating to the artist from October 17. On the four floors of the building designed by Frank Gehry will be exhibited one hundred and fifty paintings and sculptures by the American (a notable pop art personality, even if he is less known to the general public than Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein).
This corpus will be accompanied by seventy other works signed by thirty-five artists of different generations and marked by the same sensitivity. Play with the logos of beer or soda brands, tubes of lipstick and sunglasses several meters wide, televisions embedded in the canvas… The entire world of Wesselmann will be in the spotlight. Including ten paintings and twenty drawings representing Danièle Thompson.
A figure of New York in the 1960s
Of her, we know that she was the screenwriter of some of the greatest successes of French cinema, directed by her father, Gérard Oury, such as The Big Mop (1966), The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973), or signed by various filmmakers (The Boom, The Student, Queen Margot…), that she had directed six films, including The Log (1999) et Orchestra chairs (2006), participated in popular television productions like A wonderful family and, in 2023, produced with his son, Christopher, the series Bardot. We know less about the period of her life when she inspired one of the most important visual artists of the century, a figure of New York in the 1960s.
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