Tom Wesselmann’s Work at Fondation Louis Vuitton Mixes Entertainment and Unease

In the late 1950s, the Pop movement enmeshed fine art with popular culture, foregrounding everything from billboards to comic strips to celebrity to advertising. “Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann &…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris explores the American artist’s oeuvre, juxtaposed with Dadaist predecessors, Pop peers like Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg and today’s contemporary creators whose works have resonance explicitly or implicitly with this aesthetic. There are 150 works by Wesselmann on show—many of which blur the line between painting and sculpture and often incorporate multimedia elements—plus seventy works by thirty-five other artists.

Wesselmann (1931-2004) moved from his native Ohio to New York to study art; he was initially swayed by the work of Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. For his first solo exhibition, he showed alongside Arman, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely.

His bright and canny “Still Lifes” series is populated by ordinary kitchen items like Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, bottles of 7-Up, Dole Hawaiian Pineapple, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and ripe tomatoes: visions of an American household stocked with consumer goods. Wesselmann integrated functional television sets and radios into these settings; a wider sampling of works includes a real telephone, a refrigerator door and an enameled radiator—items that leap out from the flat painted surface and create realism and dimensionality. Beyond the domiciliary, his Landscape #1 (1964), spotlighting a car, integrates a realistic-sounding motor, as if the vehicle is hitting the open road in real-time.

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Kitchen paraphernalia gives way to nudes. The issue of the male gaze in this exhibition is, unfortunately, treated without rigor. The wall text hastily pardons Wesselmann’s leeriness: “The anonymity of the models, their facelessness, has often raised questions. Wesselmann, though, was not seeking to objectify but to amplify his subjects.” This justification is further couched within the context of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as though the issue is not, in fact, the blatant voyeurism of watching women’s bodies splayed out for the viewer. Elsewhere, the wall text states: “Wesselmann’s representation of sexuality is one of reciprocal desire and shared feelings”—a reach, if not an outright falsehood. The subject’s desire is not what is at stake: it’s about the viewer’s participation in the portrayal of women made sexually available for them. Wesselmann continued exploring female nudes throughout his career, later referencing Matisse in his Sunset Nudes in the 2000s. If anything, the art historical link reinforces the male gaze as a long-standing patriarchal problem.

Not all of his works are problematic. Elsewhere, his “Bathtub Collages” from 1963 and 1964 are quite funny, as if updating the painterly legacy of Degas or Bonnard studying the female subject completing her toilette. A towel slung over a rack, linoleum surfaces and toilet seats—all genuine—are incorporated onto the canvases. In the “Mouths” series, begun in 1965, billowing smoke pours out of pink lips and cigarettes dangle between fingers with painted nails. The images are sensual, the cropping of just lips and fingers heightening the extremities as spots of arousal, seemingly allusive to the world of film noir.

There is a notable sampling of female artists in the exhibition for contrast. Evelyne Axell’s painting of a woman eagerly licking a cone (Ice Cream, 1964) and Marjorie Strider’s woman’s face with lidded eyes and red lips agape (Welcome, 1963) have sexualized connotations, but this sexuality is mocked by their creators. Meret Oppenheim’s sculpture Sugar Ring (1936), which features a decorative sugar cube instead of a gem, and Hannah Höch’s deft satiric collages of Weimar society highlight female creation as clever and bold, a firm counterpoint to the pliantly gratified women of Wesselmann’s depictions.

In Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #25 (1962), the model is a blob with red lips—possibly a self-aware moment about the ridiculousness of fetishizing the female shape. Nonetheless, this is an anomaly. Great American Nude #82, fashioned out of molded plexiglass, is woman-as-offering: a reclining silhouette in thigh-high blue stockings with evident bikini tan lines, head cocked, facelessly yet frontally, towards the viewer. Characterizing this as “amplifying” rather than “objectifying” is a fallacy. In Wesselmann’s Self Portrait While Drawing (1983), dangling breasts obscure half of the artist’s face. No objectification here either, presumably.

Mickalene Thomas directly references Wesselmann’s work in Sweet Chocolate #1 (2024), using her signature rhinestones and glitter to ornament the portrait of a smoking naked Black woman dangling her bra against a collaged animal print background. In the wall text, Thomas is a vocal admirer of Wesselmann’s. Wesselmann did Black female nudes, too—yet who is behind each depiction is not negligible. His Great American Nude #54 (1964) shows a Black woman lying down on a pink sheet, her legs spread wide as though imminently waiting for a lover, or Big Brown Nude (1971), in which a woman with dark lips but no facial features is suggestively recumbent. Uninhibited and nonchalant, these depictions feel charged and somewhat fraught amidst today’s discourse about intersectional feminism.

Wesselmann’s approach to gender may be questionable, but his “Standing Still Lifes”—made using an overhead projector so he could blow up images into freestanding shaped canvases—show off his sense of humor. At the crossroads between painting and installation, these cheekily play with scale, relegating the viewer to a kind of Thumbelina. The colossally aggrandized works render a coiled belt, a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys and a beaded necklace unfathomably monumental, turning objecthood into something exaggerated and sensational.

Wesselmann clearly had a playful sensibility and a knack for finding burlesque comedy in the everyday. He is no worse than other men who have exoticized and glamorized women as mere forms, empty and superficial. Overall his work is amusing and light, but deserves to be analyzed critically as we rethink the value of representation.

“Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann &…” is at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris through February 24, 2025.