‘Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…’ at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
Paris
06 November 2024

Part retrospective, part survey of an artistic movement ‘Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…’ at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris runs from 17 October 2024 to 24 February 2025 and places the American multidisciplinary artist at the centre of an ongoing cultural paradigm. It places 150 of Wesselmann’s works in various media in conversation with the work of 35 other artists, united by a common aesthetic and set of underpinning ideas.

This exhibition is the latest chapter in a widespread critical reevaluation of the artist’s place in the cultural canon. In 2015, when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York rehung their Pop Art display, his work was placed front and centre. At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, it is once again positioned as a leading light in a movement that defines today’s visual culture.

Wesselmann is perhaps best known for his subversive series Great American Nudes. Here, he reimagined a classical artistic motif as a modern-day icon, depicting nude women in repose using the visual language of consumer production and advertising — a parlance common among his contemporaries including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

In ‘Pop Forever’, under the curatorial direction of Suzanne Pagé, this exhibition contextualises this body of work among other contemporary artists working with mythic subjects of their own. From Warhol’s screen printed renderings of Marilyn Monroe to Mickalene Thomas’ collaged images of Black women in moments of relaxation.

In November 2023, Wesselmann’s work was featured in ‘Muses: The City & The Artist’, an exhibition at Opera Gallery in New York that explored various artists’ symbiotic creative relationships with New York City. Having moved to the city to study in the 1950s, the artist quickly became a central figure in its burgeoning Pop scene. ‘Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…’ illustrates the enduring importance of this scene and its resonances in 21st century art.