Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann Is Everywhere in Paris During Art Basel

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

During the first VIP day at Art Basel Paris, right at the 10 a.m. starting gun, lines snaked in front of the entrance to the Grand Palais. Visitors then began to flood into the venue under a clear blue sky that sent intense rays of sunlight down through its majestic, windowed ceiling. To say the aisles were thronged by midday is an understatement. Some booths, like those of Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, were too crowded to navigate at all. By the afternoon, the building’s three cafes were out of food and there was a line to get into the VIP lounge. (Luckily, the food trucks outside were still going strong.)

In other words, Art Basel Paris’s first edition under that name—and its first in the Grand Palais after two editions held in a temporary tent—was off to a roaring start, continuing the energy felt in London last week. To know whether all that resulted in robust sales, we’ll have to wait a couple days. For now, we know that several big-ticket sales landed, including a Mark Bradford painting ($3.5 million), a sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud ($2.2 million), and a Louise Bourgeois watercolor ($2 million), all made available for sale by Hauser & Wirth. A beaming Marc Glimcher confirmed that Pace’s booth had sold out before 1 p.m., while Gladstone found a buyer for an Alex Katz work for $800,000 and David Zwirner parted with a Victor Man painting for $1.2 million.

One of the most prominent artists at this year’s edition, however, is the Pop painter Tom Wesselmann. That shouldn’t be surprising. On Tuesday night, the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened “Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…,” a retrospective that seemed specifically designed to change minds about the artist. He remains most famous for his “Great American Nudes,” a 1961–73 series that has proven particularly divisive, with feminist critics among its detractors.

The Louis Vuitton show takes a clever approach: it is bookended by Wesselmann’s Pop peers and red-hot contemporary artists, giving him a strong association with both. The first room features works by Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns—and not just any paintings by those artists. Warhol was represented by Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, which sold for a record-breaking $195 million at Christie’s New York in 2022. (The painting’s owner, Larry Gagosian, was of course there to admire it at the Wesselmann opening.) And Johns was represented by his 1958 Flag that mega-collector Steve Cohen bought for a reported $110 million in 2010, making it the most expensive work by a living artist at the time. The best of Wesselmann, the show seems to imply, ought to be up in that stratosphere, too—or at least closer to it than the current auction record of $10.7 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2008.

(Even though Wesselmann’s prices are not quite as high as Warhol’s, it’s not entirely fair to characterize him as under-recognized. He was championed early on by powerful figures such as curator Henry Geldzahler and dealer Ivan Karp; a “Smoker” painting appeared on a recent Taschen survey of Pop art. And still, there have been periodic attempts to brand him as forgotten, with T magazine billing him as “The Most Famous Pop Artist You Don’t Know” in 2016.)

At the other end, in the show’s final galleries, we encounter artists of today. Mickalene Thomas gets a whole room for her paintings of Black odalisques, and Derrick Adams gets an entire wall of his male nudes. Later on, there is a Jeff Koons balloon dog as well as one of his sculptures featuring basketballs floating in a vitrine. There are also a group of ceramics by Ai Weiwei and a KAWS work from his recent series based on General Mills’s monster cereals.

Over at the fair, Almine Rech, which represents the Wesselmann estate in Europe, had several works by the artist, including a large painting from 1980, Smoker #27, priced at $4.75 million. Wesselmann produced over 90 “Smokers” in his lifetime, inclusive of painted studies. Examples of the large works feature in several prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the Nasjonalmuseum in Oslo, and the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design in Japan. Gagosian, which represents the estate in the US, has a black-and-white “Smoker” from 1975, Smoker #20, also from the estate. A source told ARTnews that it was priced around $4.25 million, but the gallery declined to comment; an email sent out at the end of the day by the gallery appeared to suggest that the painting had sold at the fair. Yet another large “Smoker,” from a private collection, was for sale at Vedovi gallery, priced at €4.48 million (around $4.87 million).

During the VIP preview on Wednesday, New York–based dealer Christophe Van de Weghe sold Great American Nude #73 (1965), which came from a New York collection. He told ARTnews that he had nearly sold a smaller Wesselmann piece as well. He declined to give a price for the large work but said that similar “Great American Nudes” currently fetch anywhere between $5 million to $8 million.

“Wesselmann is by far one of the most undervalued artists,” Van de Weghe said. But that may be changing. “I’ve had 20 people come to my booth today excited about Wesselman,” he added.

Back in June at Art Basel in Switzerland, Lévy Gorvy Dayan did not sell the large 1975 “Smoker” they brought, priced at $6.7 million. In Paris, however, they are offering the smaller 1968 work Study for Bedroom Painting #2 for $600,000 (the large version is in the collection of the Kemper Museum in St. Louis) and another small painting, Study for Smoker Banner (1971), priced at $450,000. In an echo of the Louis Vuitton show, the “Bedroom Painting” study is hung next to Koons’s Wall Relief with Hummingbird (1991), and the “Smoker” study next to a 2021 Thomas painting of Racquel Chevremont, the artist’s former partner. The former juxtaposition was a coincidence, according to gallery director Emilio Steinberger, but the second was very much planned (the gallery has worked with Thomas). By mid-afternoon, the gallery had an offer on the “Bedroom Painting” study and said there was also interest in the “Smoker” study.

Dominique Lévy told ARTnews that she wondered if there weren’t too many Wesselmanns in the fair. “I don’t want to seem opportunistic,” she said.

Opinions among the dealers were split as to whether the Louis Vuitton show would push Wesselmann’s prices up. An article last week in Le Monde seemed to conclude that it was unlikely, and Lévy herself expressed some skepticism. Others were more sanguine. A full 14 pieces in the show, including several large works, came from the collection of the Mugrabi family, best known for their vast holdings of Andy Warhols—and for their influence on the Warhol market. 

The Mugrabis’ collection did not start recently, as Alberto Mugrabi, who was on hand for the Wesselmann opening, told ARTnews. “My father started buying them in 1986. My family has always seen him as a great Pop artist,” he said, adding that he is convinced Wesselman’s work will come closer to the prices of his Pop peers, if not necessarily that close. But it will take time, and more exposure and reassessment.

“Will it be $50 million in the next two years? No. But they will move up and the work will become more desirable if a few more museums do presentations,” Mugrabi said, adding “It just takes [one influential collector] to buy it. People like buying what other people are buying.”