Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Halfway through Fondation Louis Vuitton’s enjoyable and unexpected exhibition Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & . . . a bright red phone rings. It is mounted bang centre in Wesselmann’s 1963 painting “Great American Nude #44”. Reach to answer, and you find you can’t lift the receiver.The painting also stars a brash, grinning nude, legs wide apart, hands behind head, modelled by Wesselmann’s wife, Claire Selley. This radiant pink-painted figure stands boldly in an interior full of real objects — as well as the phone, there’s an actual silver radiator, a fur-edged coat hanging on a door. Next to her, in a gold-framed copy, Renoir’s muse Gabrielle appears to crane her ear to listen for the phone (in fact she is adjusting a rose in her hair). Gabrielle, decorous and concerned, is a splash of old Europe. Claire is the cheerful pin-up girl of booming postwar America.The phone rings again, still unanswerable. So with Wesselmann: how to respond to his hundreds of nude paintings celebrating frank female sexuality and commodity culture? The erotic converges with consumer desire in every image: the enraptured “Bedroom Blonde with TV”; the strawberries and cream sundaes lined up beneath a strip of pink flesh whose only feature is a mouth in “Great American Nude #27”; women luxuriating in slick shiny bathrooms in the “Bathtub Collage” series.Are they a voyeur’s dream, these Bonnard’s bathers with updated plumbing? Or social critique? Irony? Are they a voyeur’s dream, these Bonnard’s bathers with updated plumbing? Or social critique? Irony? Wesselmann explained merely that “painting, sex and humour are the most important things in my life”. For decades, curators avoided him. Disliked equally by prudish conservatives and left-leaning feminists, Wesselmann was excluded from most major Pop Art surveys. He never had an American retrospective in his lifetime. In Europe he is scarcely known.Placing Wesselmann at the heart of an ambitious exhibition charting Pop Art across a century, the Vuitton gives essential context. Thanks to generous loans, the show succeeds at one level simply as a hits parade, from Hannah Höch’s 1920s feminist photomontages — “The Father” is a man becoming a woman, legs tapering to stiletto heels — through Robert Rauschenberg’s “Vitamin”, an early “combine” hybrid of richly painted surface plus everyday elements such as rubber ring and branded cardboard box, and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip weepie “Thinking of You”, to Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog”. But as the exhibition climbs Frank Gehry’s curvy four-storey building, fresh juxtapositions and looping allusions are a delight.Especially illuminating are the women Pop artists whose female figures speak the same extrovert, gleeful language as Wesselmann. In Marjorie Strider’s metallic painting of bathers in bikinis “Triptych II (Beach Girls)”, voluminous polystyrene breasts bounce off the canvas. Kiki Kogelnik’s “Self-portrait” in psychedelic colours is a dynamic, jagged body leaping in space. Evelyne Axell’s “Ice Cream”, a woman with long-lashed eyes shut tight, lusciously licking an ice cream, was banned as too suggestive on Facebook in 2016 when Philadelphia Museum of Art posted it as an example of a Pop Art piece where women “pursue satisfaction on their own terms”. All evoke the thrill of early 1960s sexual liberation.Nonetheless, the show is mostly a road trip across macho America. Early on, a VW hurtles at you to the soundtrack of its revving engine in Wesselmann’s “Landscape #1”. Alongside, James Rosenquist’s billboard-size “President Elect”, collaging John F Kennedy’s election poster and his offering — “half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake”, as Rosenquist elucidated — asks, what does the nation want? As the world seeks to comprehend American nostalgia and patriotism, the show feels timely and exciting.No expense has been spared to borrow Pop Art’s icons. Warhol’s sparkling “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” — sold in 2022 for $195mn, the record for a 20th-century artwork — meets Wesselmann’s “Mouth #14 (Marilyn)”, a huge shaped canvas of pouting scarlet lips with wisps of hair drifting across them like flames. Jasper Johns’ “Flag” — at $110mn holding the record price for a living artist — is so beautifully painted, in feathery, tender strokes, the lively encaustic surface rooted in gestural abstraction, that it seems to rebuke Pop Art’s ubiquitous hard-edged cool. Johns’ flags were surely a memory when Wesselmann, deciding in 1961 “to Americanize the nude”, chose the red, white and blue palette of the US flag for his “Great American Nude” series. He included stars and stripes motifs in numerous examples: as wallpaper and billowing banner in “Great American Nude #34”; as a poster hanging next to a portrait of Kennedy in “Great American Nude #21”; as a badge presiding over strips of white and blue dissolving into a pool where the model floats blissfully in “Great American Nude #38”. Yet the nude, it turned out, was not so easily nationalised. Unlike his American Pop Art peers, Wesselmann’s enduring fascination was with Matisse and French art. “Great American Nude #1” sets out the tension between the odalisque, grand motif of classical European painting, here flattened into a lithe silhouette in the manner of Matisse, and a Pop Art background studded with stars and stripes. Later Wesselmann would appropriate Matisse paintings directly. A roughly scrawled nude lies between a crate of Coca-Cola bottles and a reproduction of “The Romanian Blouse” in “Great American Nude #26”. A modern American apartment, actual window, blinds, rug, frame the blonde reclining beneath Matisse’s “Plum Blossoms” in the assemblage “Great American Nude #48”. “I am interested in assembling a situation resembling painting, rather than painting,” Wesselmann said. One way to consider his oeuvre beyond sex and sociology is as an exploration of pictorial illusion, its possibilities and limits.In similar vein, still lifes include working television sets juxtaposed with tilting apples, referencing Cézanne (“Still Life #31”), and a sugar pink fridge door, replica 7 Up bottles and painted table groaning with branded food (MoMA’s “Still Life #30”).By the 1970s the “Standing Still Lifes” reached the scale of stage backdrops. Shaped canvases depicting nail varnish bottles, lipsticks, cigarettes and rings rise metres high, boudoir accessories transformed into absurdist suggestions of glossy American urban skylines. A puff of smoke from a disembodied mouth (“Smoker #10”) writhes above us, a sinister cloud. The distortion makes the everyday seem monstrous. The American dream starts to look like a nightmare.Through it all, Wesselmann continued to draw with a linear fluidity echoing Matisse. Like most Pop artists he was inventive in the 1960s–1970s, then became repetitive, but he left a moving swansong. Suffering from a heart condition, he painted in the year before his death the extremely abbreviated, monumental “Sunset Nudes” (2003-4), again modelled by Selley. “Sunset Nude with the Dream” includes an image of Picasso’s “Le Rêve”. “Sunset with Matisse Apples on Pink Tablecloth” incorporates simplified renderings of a Matisse still life. Sunset oranges, yellows, reds are harmonious; the glowing warmth is also that of an artist in love with his model, his medium and the painterly European tradition, and happy to say so.‘Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & . . . ‘ is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, to February 24 2025Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
