Greedy lips. Make-up eyelids. Pink dermis. The flesh-colored work by the American artist Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), which the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is exhibiting starting October 17, is identifiable among a thousand, without its true value being recognized. His frank palette was considered too flashy and his desire-filled subjects too obscene. When the Whitney Museum reopened in a brand new building in 2015, the painter was enthroned in the room dedicated to pop art, a label he often refuted during his lifetime.
Of all his contemporaries, he is the unloved. “However, he is one of the big three, along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.”argues New York merchant Christophe Van de Weghe. Their prices, however, are light years ahead of their peers. “When a Warhol masterpiece is worth 200 million dollars, Lichtenstein’s 55 million, a great Wesselmann is worth 6 million dollars! The price of a young artist of whom we do not know how much he will be worth in five years, while Wesselmann is in history! »laments Van de Weghe.
His colleague Emilio Steinberger, one of the directors of the New York gallery Lévy Gorvy, offers the beginning of an explanation: “He produced much less than the other two. For a Wesselmann there are fifteen Lichtensteins and thirty Warhols. People are reluctant to put it up for sale. As a result, the market is choppy. » This is partly true, but it is not the only explanation.
Born in 1931 in Ohio, Wesselmann first dreamed of being a caricaturist before establishing himself as an artist starting in 1961 with his series of great american nude, Christophe Van de Weghe offered a version at the Art Basel fair in June for $5.5 million. Although he also paints close-ups of men, rods and acorns, the woman immediately appears as an obsessive subject, with her body delimited, surrounded, her limbs shattered like a puzzle. Even the frames follow feminine contours. Unlike his pop art comrades, who took their female figures from magazines, he painted models in person. Like Matisse, his absolute reference.
Wesselmann may be a worthy heir to the French painter, but his nudes fit into a completely different context, the hedonism of sixty and American consumerism. Can of Budweiser, shake, 7 Up, hamburger… All the attributes ofamerican lifestyle appear in the decoration.
Suspicious work
For a long time, Tom Wesselmann’s market was stagnant. Work that excessively fetishizes the necessarily delicious mouth, the nipples, the pubis, or the bikini line, may have seemed repetitive and, worse still, suspicious in the eyes of feminists. Wesselmann certainly embraces the sexual revolution: his women are liberated and pleasurable. But devoid of gaze, associated with fruits or flowers like a simple still life, they seem simply good to be looked at, women-objects in short.
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