“Beyond Pop: Tom Wesselmann”

Curated by Stéphane Aquin and Marco Livingstone

When Pop artist Tom Wesselmann ghostwrote his own monograph in 1980 (his nom de plume: Slim Stealingworth), it wasn’t so much a postmodernist gesture of institutional masquerade as it was an attempt to slip himself into the canon; until that point, scholars simply hadn’t given him the attention he felt he deserved. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will argue for Wesselmann’s canonization by more conventional means, hosting his first North American retrospective, including 150 paintings, drawings, collages, and models (plus archival material) dating from 1959 through 2004. There will be nudes in abundance, as well as lesser-known shaped canvases and metallic abstractions. The catalogue includes scholarly essays, testimonials by younger artists, and (most astonishingly) documents of Wesselmann’s forays into country music.