Charting the Legacy of Pop Art in the Work of Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Tomokazu Matsuyama
Pop Art emerged at a pivotal moment when mass consumption and communication strategies were just beginning to take shape, capturing the “inevitable phenomenon” of postwar American pop culture and its persistent and pervasive imagery. Often termed “capitalist realism,” Pop Art reflects a radical acceptance of modern civilization, embracing the ways society communicates, produces and consumes. Unlike earlier avant-garde movements, which aimed to narrow the gap between art and everyday life, Pop Art was the first to fully engage with the cultural landscape as it was—making it democratic and broadly accessible in a way few movements had managed before. This accessibility has helped make Pop Art one of the most inviting and relatable art forms for the general public. Though contemporary critics dismissed its “poverty of visual invention” and even questioned its status as art, Pop Art broke down the walls between art and culture, speaking directly in the language of the everyday society it portrayed.
“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton offers a deeply comprehensive look at Pop Art’s enduring significance. The exhibition centers on Tom Wesselmann, a key figure in the movement, with 150 paintings and other works that highlight and explore the legacy of his approach. It then expands to explore Pop Art through the lens of seventy works by thirty-five artists across generations and nationalities, creating a visual narrative of the ways subsequent generations of artists have engaged critically with the pop culture of their time. The diverse collection of works questions what Pop Art means today and its relevance in the future in an age of hyper-communication through digital media that empowers consumers to act as co-creators, enabling the continuous, global circulation of messages and cultural expressions.
On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening during Paris Art Week, Observer spoke with artists Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Tomokazu Matsuyama—all of whom have newly commissioned works presented in the show—about their relation to Tom Wesselmann and Pop Art, and what this term means for them today.
“I think that Pop art was the only art movement to date, and the audience that the work that’s made is a response to not only the society that informs it but also the audience that embraces it and communicates to it,” Adams said. The link between this artist and Pop Art, and in particular Wesselmann’s work, lies in how he navigates media culture and discusses consumerism. His relationship with Wesselmann started while studying his archives, as he was interested in understanding more about his process and how it related the material construction of his work to media culture. “I was curious about how he started, finished and collaged things together, whether this was in paintings or sculptural objects. This is something that I also do in my work.”
Adams was particularly drawn to Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes series and the controversial way it portrayed the female figure in American culture, sparking in him a mix of interest, concern and curiosity. His response to Wesselmann is embodied in the series Great Black American/African American Nudes, a set of four new works in the show depicting Black male nudes, whose colors—drawn from the African American flag popularized by David Hammons (black, green and red)—are accented with comic-book-style onomatopoeias. Through these parodies of the American dream, Adams critiques the image of white, heterosexual, patriotic American superheroes, challenging the paradoxical values underpinning this dream and exposing its inherently marginalizing nature, which has long excluded entire segments of the population, at least in media representation. In a conversation with curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, Adams noted that “they aren’t necessarily counterimages, but more of an offering to assist in the expansion of the notion associated with who and what ‘Great American’ fully represents.” The figures are also partially censored, adding a playful, provocative edge, blending humor with eroticism as they evoke social media’s use of symbols like eggplants and peaches to imply sexual meanings without explicit language.
Adams observed that consumer culture and communication have shifted significantly since Pop Art’s emergence: “I think we are now more self-conscious and aware of our image.” Social media has fundamentally altered the dynamic between media and consumers, making them far less passive, as they now play a critical role in co-creating both media and meaning. “Now you can curate your image and can no longer be objectified, but you can objectify yourself,” he clarified. Rather than imposing fixed models and desires, media industries now cater to a more fluid sense of desire. “It’s more about allowing people to be part of popular culture and contributing in defining what this should be.”
Adams’ work thoughtfully examines how people express themselves through media today, using daily “staging” to shape identity and storytelling, which directly impacts consumer habits. He also noted that the art world and institutions are now much more attuned to what “Pop” signifies for audiences and actively seek ways to connect with it; data allows for a deeper understanding of what people enjoy, desire and respond to, along with insights on viewers—knowledge widely used in marketing across industries. Reflecting on his relationship with Pop Art, Adams suggested that the references to popular culture in his work “allow people to have a direct relationship with it.”
Thomas observed that while the willingness to engage with contemporary culture persists, the very definition of “popular culture” has evolved along with the artistic practices addressing it. “It’s transformed because it’s of that moment,” she said, and art “is about how we define it as a culture and how those artists decide to pull from that particular moment and what they want to present to the world. It’s about the new technology and the new media that are available. Today, it’s more diverse, it’s expansive, it’s global, it’s universal. Art is now amalgamated with different sort of ethnicities in a global society.” Thomas’ own style reflects this shift; her vibrant, engaging works draw from pop culture, particularly in their connection to fashion trends. Bold depictions celebrating the beauty and resilience of Black female bodies challenge historical narratives that have sought to erase or marginalize them.
In her work, Thomas often employs photographic materials, engaging in the hybridization of painting and mechanical reproduction. She fragments these images, adding unexpected materials like rhinestones and glitter to empower femininity and female independence. During our conversation, she shared her longstanding fascination with Tom Wesselmann’s work, noting significant similarities between hers and his. While an undergraduate at Pratt Institute, Thomas discovered Wesselmann’s art, conducting research in his archives—a journey culminating in her current exhibition. What particularly interested her, as she emphasized, was how Wesselmann portrayed both white and Black female bodies on equal terms, exploring how both inspire desire. “When it came to the American nude female body, there was no hierarchy between a Black woman’s body and a white woman’s body,” she said. This was radical for its time and remains so to some degree even today. Thomas, as a queer Black woman creating art that celebrates Black female bodies, still encounters resistance.
At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Thomas presents works that explore Black erotica and delve into themes of sexuality, desire and the female gaze with a boldness akin to Wesselmann’s, similarly challenging societal norms around the representation of the nude female body, especially the Black female body. She highlights a shared element in Wesselmann’s work and her own: empowering women by portraying them as fully aware of their seductive power. This approach invites desire while pushing back against the objectification of female bodies in mass media and advertising. Examining these narratives and the societal dynamics they reflect remains one of Pop Art’s greatest strengths, according to Thomas. “I think most artists today are pop artists. We’re always bringing things to the forefront and bringing attention to what surrounds us, inviting others to question it.”
Japanese-born and U.S.-based, Matsuyama offers a unique perspective, highlighting the pervasive influence of American commercial culture worldwide while drawing parallels with Japanese culture. His work examines how these cultural strategies operate within commercial, media, and social media realms, contributing to a global culture that often leans toward homogenization yet thrives on a rich exchange of symbols and elements from diverse backgrounds.
In particular, Matsuyama’s shaped canvases feature densely layered collages that capture the cultural and aesthetic diversity of our global society. The sources for each piece range from traditional art history to contemporary fashion campaigns, along with objects and interiors inspired by popular design magazines. These are often blended with references to Japanese culture, visible in the manga-inspired flatness of his characters and traditional landscape motifs. His art embodies a cultural fluidity that reflects the diasporic experience and the global nature of identity, moving beyond a fixed idea of pop culture. “I was a minority when I got to the U.S., but even in Japan, I was that, as my father was a pastor,” he explained. “Throughout my life, I couldn’t adapt. Now everybody’s trying to adapt to the world. What I’m doing in my work is adapting different influences to reflect us.”
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When discussing his connections to Pop Art, Matsuyama noted that if his work is categorized as such, it’s because his palette is colorful and certain elements align with the genre. He also acknowledged the influence of pioneers like Warhol and Wesselmann, the latter of whom played a key role in his early digital collages, which he later translated to shaped canvas. What intrigues him most, however, is that while Japanese culture has traditionally valued fine objects such as historical ceramics or porcelains, Wesselmann and other Pop artists elevated the everyday object to a similar level. “My way of assembling fictional landscapes from everyday items represents a continuation and transformation of Pop Art,” he said. At the same time, Matsuyama layers his work with additional dimensions, incorporating a final dripping of white paint reminiscent of Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and treating art and cultural history as a vast, global archive—carefully researched, selected and recombined using digital tools before translating them into painting.
At the same time, while Pop artists like Warhol explored the imagination conveyed through media such as TV, magazines and advertisements, Matsuyama engages with a digital archive of our civilization—one that already fuses traditional and historical, contemporary and vernacular, on a global and multicultural scale. He also draws parallels to today’s cultural disorientation, noting that “back then, in the ’70s, America was going through this huge economic growth, and therefore there was a dark side that was coming.” The quest for idols, for points of reference, for something to believe in is what both pop culture and Pop Art ultimately express. “Now we’re going to this last generation stage, like: Where do we fit? What do we belong to?”
In this light, Matsuyama’s art—and indeed, this entire exhibition—can be seen as a celebration of “Pop” as a model for multiculturalism, which has already permeated today’s global popular culture. This model embraces the complex, multifaceted nature of modern popular culture and offers the potential to move beyond the subtle nationalist undertones of the American Dream that Pop Art once exposed, instead fostering a new sense of belonging rooted in shared global identity and an ongoing, cross-border exchange of goods and symbolic meanings they carry.
“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton through February 24, 2025.