Most artists in need of materials head for an art-supply shop. Tom Wesselmann, the American Pop artist, adopted a different approach. Struck by postwar America’s punchy advertising hoardings, he wrote to companies responsible for billboards and requested imagery. As a result, many of his colossal paintings incorporate fragments from ads he had encountered in New York and elsewhere: an orange as big as a tractor wheel; people-sized ice-cream sundaes and cola bottles; a vast simulacrum of a can of Budweiser, as imposing and blunt as a tombstone.
Some of these still lifes appear in a new exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and their effect is uncanny. Wesselmann wanted people to feel dwarfed by his art, like Alice shrinking in Wonderland; today, his paintings also suggest something of the supersized, imperial self-confidence that once animated his native land. When, towards the end of the show, we encounter his still lifes from the 1970s and 80s – massive shaped canvases arranged in groups like theatrical flats, often representing hard and shiny objects (metal keys, a black Bakelite telephone, a gold-and-pink lipstick with a ballistic missile’s heft) – there is a danger, seemingly, of getting crushed.
Why is Wesselmann, who died in 2004, not better known? Born in Cincinnati in 1931, he was in New York at the turn of the 1960s, at Pop art’s much-mythologised start. Yet he lacks the name recognition of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, or even, say, Claes Oldenburg (who died two years ago). This is something the curators of Pop Forever, Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, wish to correct.
Their strategy is not simply to orchestrate a conventional retrospective. Although almost 240 works by Wesselmann fill Frank Gehry’s airy but assertive building in the Bois de Boulogne, they are accompanied throughout by pieces by 35 other historical and contemporary artists, from Kurt Schwitters to Njideka Akunyili Crosby. There’s even a room devoted to Pop’s early 20th-century ‘roots’. Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made urinal, Fountain (1917/1964), anticipates by almost five decades the inclusion of toilet seats in Wesselmann’s ‘Bathtub Collages’.
On the Road juxtaposes James Rosenquist’s President Elect (1960–61), which depicts a gleaming hubcap beside JFK’s beaming face and a slice of cake, with a crushed Fiat painted bumper to bumper by Sylvie Fleury with pink Givenchy nail polish, and several landscapes by Wesselmann in which automobiles appear. One emits the sound of an engine as a VW Beetle seems to hurtle into view, threatening to turn the viewer into roadkill. (See? With Wesselmann’s art, there is often a chance of getting squashed.) He was forever enhancing his paintings’ trompe-l’oeil qualities by incorporating real-world elements such as radios and televisions, a telephone that occasionally rings and even, in Bathtub Collage #1 (1963), pink toilet paper (preserving which is now the responsibility of conservators at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst).
Another section gathers work by several female Pop artists who have recently been regaining recognition. They include Marjorie Strider, whose Welcome (1963) presents the cartoon-like face of a dead-eyed beauty with glistening red lips that form a crater-like ‘O’, and could be a confrontational close-up portrait of a sex doll.
It is clever to include a challenge to the male gaze in a show about Wesselmann, who is also known for his ‘Great American Nudes’, the first of which appeared in 1961. In these pictures, disrobed models, as voluptuous as any depicted by Henri Matisse, appear with prominent lips and rubbery nipples. The curators are adamant they do not objectify women, and that Wesselmann, whose method was meticulous not seedy, was interested only in Americanising the European tradition of the female nude. ‘These are strong, self-empowered women,’ says Hofbauer, who points out that Wesselmann was painting in the middle of a sexual revolution, and mostly refrained from giving his nudes come-hither eyes.
Yet, strolling through the foundation, I was struck by how surreal and fetishistic, even creepy, some of Wesselmann’s pictures seem. He was obsessed with nail polish and tan lines, and had a thing for women’s feet. A series of ‘Mouths’ presents disembodied crimson lips sucking on cigarettes on an unnervingly immense scale; alien and strange, they could be pictures of flying saucers. From some, smoke streams out suggestively: they’re almost X-rated, and certainly freaky.
If pleasure is Wesselmann’s subject, he imbues it with an off-putting plastic quality. (In several still lifes, he literally includes artificial fruit.) Yesteryear items in his pictures – a red towel, a red rug, a fur-trimmed red coat – summon the ambience of a cheap hotel, a destination, perhaps, for by-the-hour, transactional trysts. In the foreground of Bedroom Blonde with TV (1984–93), a woman with heavy makeup appears to have passed out, while behind her a television set still flickers. Was her drink spiked?
Is all this a commentary on the artifice of the American Dream? When it comes to Pop art’s relationship to Western capitalism, which it raids with such abandon, this is the big debate: is it celebration or critique? With Wesselmann, I suspect it’s the latter. His images are sufficiently ambiguous to keep things interesting.
‘Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann & …’ runs at the Fondation Louis Vuitton 17 Oct–24 Feb. For more information, visit fondationlouisvuitton.fr
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