There was a bit of light-hearted eye-rolling after the Fondation Louis Vuitton launched its Tom Wesselmann retrospective in Paris the other week. One industry writer, in particular, thought she was being naughty by telling her readers that some of the works on display might be up for sale. The joke, of course, is that you can hardly give away a Tom Wesselmann these days. Maybe it’s the prevalence of uncomfortably explicit nudes; or his fascination with smoking; or what appears to be a fetish for nipples and toes; or his habit of painting gargantuan still lifes that can only really be displayed or owned by a museum. Whatever the reason, Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann &… seems designed not to sell his work—the art-rich Mugrabi family loaned 15 works to the show—but rather to set the stage for reviving the late American artist’s reputation and possibly awakening his dormant market.
The beginning of the show, which is running through February in the basement of the Frank Gehry-designed museum, situates Wesselmann among his pop art peers. There’s a Marisol, Martial Raysse, Rosalyn Drexler, and even early work by Yayoi Kusama, to signify the international and commercial appeal of pop art. There’s also a hall of fame of big-money pop artists: a Jasper Johns flag painting (top auction price: $55 million); more than one canvas by Roy Lichtenstein (top auction price: $95 million); and Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, which set the artist’s record price at auction when Larry Gagosian paid $195 million for it in 2022. By contrast, Wesselmann’s top auction sale was $10 million—and that was in 2008.