There are professional muses, adored by painters and jealous by others. Decades after setting foot in a workshop, they still attend openings. They remind anyone who will listen of their glorious past, when they posed for a fascinated artist. There are those who history has confined to the rank of muses, although they themselves were artists. And there are, much more rarely, muses who ignore themselves. Danièle Thompson is one of them.
In November 2023, the French director was in New York and visited the studio, in southern Manhattan, of the painter Tom Wesselmann, who died in 2004 at the age of 73. In the early 1970s she posed for him on several occasions. Like some other women the American artist had recruited as models. But that day, Danièle Thompson received a surprise. On a large wall of the studio, now the headquarters of The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, an organization that manages the painter’s work, were hung reproductions of dozens of paintings and drawings that represent her. “I didn’t know he had created so many works based on me, says the 82-year-old filmmaker, smiling. I was surprised to realize that it had, in fact, been so important to him. »
“Danièle Thompson played a crucial role in Tom Wesselmann’s career” say Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, guest curators of the extensive exhibition that the Louis Vuitton Foundation is dedicating to the artist starting October 17. On the four floors of the building designed by Frank Gehry, one hundred and fifty paintings and sculptures by the American will be exhibited (a notable pop art personality, although less known to the general public than Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein).
This corpus will be accompanied by another seventy works signed by thirty-five artists from different generations and marked by the same sensitivity. Play with logos of beer or soft drink brands, tubes of lipstick and sunglasses several meters wide, televisions embedded in the canvas… Everyone at Wesselmann will be the center of attention. Includes ten paintings and twenty drawings depicting Danièle Thompson.
A figure from New York in the 1960s
We know about her that she was a screenwriter for some of the biggest hits of French cinema, directed by her father, Gérard Oury, such as The big mop (1966), The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973), or signed by several filmmakers (The boom, the student, Queen Margot…), who had directed six films, including The record (1999) and orchestra chairs (2006), participated in popular television productions such as a wonderful family and, in 2023, he produced with his son, Christopher, the series bardot. We know less about the period of his life in which he inspired one of the most important visual artists of the century, a figure in 1960s New York.
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