Tits and ass

Why the usually pitch-perfect Fondation Louis Vuitton has been misguided with a giant Tom Wesslemann retrospective.

If you were planning to hold an audience friendly, ticketed (ie expensive) show on Pop Art in a big, glossy (expensive) building, whom would you choose as your headliner, in order to bring the crowds in? Of course, we know who. But say all the Warhols were already booked up and busy making a fortune for another institution somewhere else, then who? Maybe Roy Lichtenstein. Or Jasper Johns. You would probably not choose Tom Wesselmann.

Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life No 36, 1964

Who? I knew his name. I knew his style was giant and glossy, and that he liked to explore the links between advertising and art, and he used TV screens, and that he was definitely one of the Pop brigade, but 150 pictures? In the giant Fondation Louis Vuitton?

But this is a French exhibition. And so the curators, as they often do here, deal with an obscure headliner by packing it with Other Stuff, in this case 70 works by Associates and Friends of Wesselmann, some of whom are extremely famous, and putting their names on the poster. It is sort of “Group Show by Stealth”, or a show with “There’s A Lot Of It About” syndrome.

Lichtenstein’s Thinking of Him, 1963

Hence in Room One, we have the gorgeous Lichtenstein “Thinking of him” to cheer us all up, and then as you round the corner, you are presented with a classic Warhol. Not just that, but one of the four ‘Shot’ Marilyns which in 1964 was aimed at by one Dorothy Podber, a performance artist who asked Warhol if she could shoot the pictures, and on being given permission, whipped out a revolver rather than a camera. Gotcha!

Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964

This one, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, was bought by the dealer Larry Gagosian for $195 million at auction two years ago. It is the most expensive work of 20th century art sold in a public sale. No wonder it has its own special wall in the gallery.

Despite the presence of such huge works, the exhibition is presented as if the host nation is frankly, still coming to terms with the fact that it managed to drop the artistic baton sometime around the middle of the 20^th century.

Jasper Johns’ Flag, a Stars and Stripes rendered in encaustic (paint mixed with wax) is presented here as an arriviste which “struck the mortal blow to the preeminence of European art”. I cannot think of anywhere else in the world which would continue to describe the triumph of mid-century American art with this type of backhand compliment.

Where it all began…Duchamp’s Fountain 1917/1964

Nor would any other nation have the vanity to bring out Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece Fountain, conceived in 1916, just in case we had forgotten that, er, the Europeans got there first. But here it is, borrowed from the Centre Pompidou up the road, cosily witty in a little room alongside some pieces by Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters.

Wesselmann clearly got a bit bored with rendering ketchup bottles and letting Andy and Roy have all the fun, hence after a while, a move towards painting women. Or should I say pieces of women. He loves feet! He ought to have renamed himself Tom Foot Fetishmann. Or Mr Mouthmann. Describing his fetish with stylised, lipsticked mouths, he explains “I chose to make an enormous cut-out mouth in order to isolate and intensify the part of the body that has a high degree of both sexual and expressive connotations.” Mick, Keith, are you listening? His Marilyn mouth, whose position and inclusion of blonde hair is supposed to represent the star, is even used on the poster next to the (superior) Warhol version.

His Great American Nudes proved a great market. The GANs must have earned Wesslemann a fortune, as there were so many of them. Here, they seem to go on for ever, in the glorious Louis Vuitton building. The GANs have zero personality and perfect bodies. They also love sunbathing. When Wesselmann removes their clothes, guess what? Their perfect bodies are suntanned, so tits and ass are tan-free. At one point, he cuts to the chase and removes bodies and faces completely, so that only the tips of their breasts remain. The bulls-eye, so to speak. Hence, this frankly creepy self-portrait.

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Wesselmann’s Self Portrait while Drawing, 1983

Maybe it’s meant to be ‘bitingly ironic’, or at least that’s what Le Monde says. Anyway, it made me think of this old saw

In case the audience gets a bit fed up, the show has invited contemporary artist Derrick Adams to give us “a counterimage”, in the form of four nudes of a man depicted as an action hero. Only Derrick does not seem to have got the joke, and rather than depicting a man sans everything bar a perfect penis, Adams’ Super Nudes have their genitalia coyly blacked out by what look like bunches of grapes. Ho hum.

Wesslemann’s art is glossy and - regardless of the nudity - about as sexually threatening as a copy of Vogue. Maybe that’s why when we visited it, it was packed. It is undeniably easy on the eye.

If you are going to visit this exhibition, which I think despite an obsession with nipples, offers a revealing (French) take on Pop, with some pieces by artists I did not know, the best piece is by Sylvie Fleury. It is a crashed Fiat car entirely painted in Givenchy nail varnish.

It provoked me to think of this iconic feminist moment. Yes, after this show I admit to feeling a bit like running Tom Wesslemann down. Or at least, swerving away.

Sylvie Fleury, Skin Crime 3 (Givenchy 318), 1997

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