{"id":64163,"date":"2026-09-29T12:34:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T10:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/?p=64163"},"modified":"2026-10-02T23:35:01","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T21:35:01","slug":"pop-forever-tom-wesselmann-and-the-art-of-everyday-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/pop-forever-tom-wesselmann-and-the-art-of-everyday-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann and the Art of Everyday Desire"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than two decades after his death, Tom Wesselmann (1931\u20132004) continues to command renewed attention as one of the defining figures of American Pop Art. Far from being a peripheral figure in the movement, Wesselmann was recognised from an early stage by leading museums and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. His inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s Recent Painting U.S.A.: The Figure<\/em> in 1962 placed his work firmly within the emerging American art landscape, while his prominent representation in the Whitney Museum of American Art\u2019s American Pop Art<\/em> exhibition in 1974 further affirmed his position within the movement. This institutional recognition was reinforced by the major European retrospective Tom Wesselmann: Retrospective 1959\u20131993<\/em>, which travelled between 1994 and 1996 to eleven leading European institutions, including the Kunsthalle T\u00fcbingen, the Palais des Beaux-Arts and Berlin\u2019s Neue Nationalgalerie. Today, the continuing reappraisal of his work serves not to elevate him belatedly into the history of Pop Art, but rather to underline the originality, influence and enduring relevance of an artist who was already recognised as a major figure during his lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The turning point was Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &\u2026<\/em> at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which ran from 17 October 2024 to 24 February 2025. Frank Gehry’s glass-and-steel building, spread over several floors, was an ideal stage for some 150 of Wesselmann’s paintings, drawings and works in other materials, from his first collages of 1959 to his last paintings of 2004. Curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, with Suzanne Pag\u00e9 as artistic director, the show placed him among 35 artists of different generations and nationalities, from the 1920s to today. Their argument was simple: Pop art never really ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom Wesselmann, Mouth 14 (Marilyn), 1967<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Tom Wesselmann, Still Life 60, 1973.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pop art is usually filed under the 1960s, but its roots go back to the 1920s. The Paris show made that clear by opening with Dada. Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and Kurt Schwitters’s collages of tickets, labels and scraps pointed straight to the small collages Wesselmann began making in New York in 1959. Hannah H\u00f6ch’s photomontages belonged to the same family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The name itself came later. It is most often credited to the British critic Lawrence Alloway, who in the mid-1950s was writing about “mass popular art”: advertising, film, magazines and packaging. Pop took these ordinary, mass-produced things and gave them the status of icons. It was never a political movement in any formal sense, yet by turning its back on the heroics of Abstract Expressionism it overturned the art-historical order of the 20th century, and in doing so joined a much wider cultural argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pop was also global from the start. Tate Modern’s The World Goes Pop<\/em> (2015\u201316), curated by Jessica Morgan, showed artists from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe and Japan working with the same visual language at almost the same moment. Pop Forever<\/em> took up that thread and brought it up to date. Alongside Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol and Marjorie Strider hung Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Tomokazu Matsuyama. The point was that Pop is far more than a celebration of Western consumerism, which is how it is still sometimes dismissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Evelyne Axell, Ice Cream, 1964
Huile sur toile, 80 x 70 cm Collection particuli\u00e8re, Belgique | Cr\u00e9dit artiste :<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Jeff Koons, Three Ball 50 50 Tank (Wilson Agressor, Wilson Supershot, Dr. J. Silver Series), 1985.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Roy Lichtenstein, Thinking of Him, 1963<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the heart of Wesselmann’s work is the female nude, one of the oldest subjects in Western painting. That makes him more traditional than many of his Pop contemporaries. Where others took on the American flag, soup cans and comic strips, Wesselmann went back to the reclining nude, the still life, the interior and the landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was a deliberate choice. As a student at New York’s Cooper Union in the late 1950s he idolised Willem de Kooning. “He was what I wanted to be,” he later said. He came to believe he had to deny himself what he loved in de Kooning and go the other way. De Kooning’s women are harsh and unsettling; Wesselmann’s celebrate the body. Early works such as Starry Night Nude<\/em> (1959) still show his debt to Matisse and Van Gogh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Great American Nude<\/em> series began in 1961, reportedly after he dreamed of the phrase “red, white and blue”. It grew to 100 numbered works by 1973. The women are flat, featureless and sensual, reclining among stars and stripes, collaged landscapes, portraits of the founding fathers, and real objects: a radio, a telephone, a television switched on. In art history the nude was often a passive object of desire. Wesselmann’s nudes are openly erotic, confident and powerful. Pieces such as Mouth #14 (Marilyn)<\/em> (1967), with Marilyn Monroe’s red lips separated from her face on a shaped canvas nearly three metres wide, and the Smoker<\/em> paintings that began in the late 1960s, were considered shocking in their day. They still hold the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude 31, 1962.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Much of this work cannot be separated from Claire Selley, a fellow Cooper Union student whom Wesselmann met in 1957 and married in 1963. She was his most frequent model, and across the decades her image moves easily between model, muse, wife, artist and creative co-conspirator. Wesselmann once said: “Painting, sex, and humour are the most important things in my life.” The Claire works bring all three together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Paris survey, hung chronologically, showed how restless Wesselmann was. In the 1960s his still lifes took in real objects, from refrigerators to plastic corncobs. In the 1970s he built the Standing Still Lifes<\/em>, freestanding shaped canvases that blew up lipsticks, nail polish and sunglasses to monumental size; Still Life #60<\/em> (1974) is almost eight metres long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1983 he had the idea of lifting a drawing off the page and fixing it straight onto the wall. He spent a year helping to develop a laser-cutting process precise enough to do it, and the resulting steel and aluminium “drawings” are among the first uses of laser-cut metal in art. By the 1990s these cut-outs had moved to the edge of abstraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He ended where he began, with Matisse. The Sunset Nudes<\/em> of 2003\u201304, made after serious heart trouble, are simplified, flat and bright, a homage to the master he admired most. He made eight in his final year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom Wesselmann, Still Life 36, 1964<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Tom Wesselmann, Still Life 34, 1963<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The renewed attention has not faded since Paris. In 2026 alone, Gagosian staged his first solo exhibition in Greece, Seascapes, Still Lifes, and Nudes<\/em>, in Athens; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art opened Tom Wesselmann All Out<\/em>, drawn from the Mugrabi Collection and on view until 26 December 2026; and in September his Cooper Square studio in New York opened to the public for the first time since his death, for Wesselmann x Matsuyama<\/em>, pairing his work with that of Tomokazu Matsuyama. Earlier, the Palm Springs Art Museum put him in dialogue with Mickalene Thomas in The Female Form<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seventy years after Pop first raised everyday objects to the level of icons, that idea feels more current than ever, in a world of brands, screens and endlessly shared images. Wesselmann’s great insight was that the oldest subjects in art could live comfortably inside that world. Pop, it turns out, really is forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our gratitude to the Louis Vuitton Foundation for the images:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr\/en\/events\/pop-forever-tom-wesselmann-and<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Original article by Elga Wimmer (December 2024). Revised and updated September 2026.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than two decades after his death, Tom Wesselmann (1931\u20132004) continues to command renewed attention as one of…","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":64164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[4490,4489,4488,2087],"class_list":{"0":"post-64163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-art-culture","8":"tag-artexhibitions","9":"tag-contemporaryart","10":"tag-popart","11":"tag-cultural-heritage"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64307,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64163\/revisions\/64307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}