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.
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
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........