Since October 17 and until February 24, 2025the Louis Vuitton Foundation devotes a beautiful retrospective to Tom Wesselmann and other Pop’art artists: “ Pop forever ».
Tom Wesselmann is less known than Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or Robert Rauschenberg and yet he counts just as much as them in this approach which marked art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Wesselmann experienced a late rehabilitation after being suspected of license for having reintroduced the theme of the Nude at the heart of contemporary painting.
Tom Wesselmann incarne the spirit of Pop'art. At the dawn of the 1960s, unlike other artists, it was without a priori social that he seizes everyday objects of American life, and in particular the automobile, and that he integrates them into his decorations to emphasize a composition or to divert the viewer's eye from the voluptuousness of the subject.
He describes the timewithout passing judgment on the excesses of consumer society, nor on the carnal fulfillment that they seem to produce on the housewives who enjoy it. It is only important for him to ensure as much efficiency as possible in his paintings, so he paints in flat areas.
During his first exhibition, he developed the theme of Great American Nudes which he only parted with on very rare occasions. In the late 1960s, he enlarged fragments of female bodies.
In 1983, he performed his first Steel Drawings. As if released from a sheet of aluminum, these thick line drawings form strange sculptures, flat and colorful. Wesselmann experiments with several materials and different techniquesabandons aluminum which must be chiseled by hand and chooses steel which can be laser cut.
From 1993, computer science arises in his art when he composes gigantic polychromes using computer-aided design. Little by little freed from the constraints of the pictorial gesture, Tom Wesselmann only works on the geometry of shapes and the assembly of colors…
