Pouty lips. Waxed eyelids. Pink skin. The fleshy work of American artist Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), on show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris from October 17, is unmistakably his own but never got the recognition it deserved. His bold palette was deemed too flashy, his subjects too full of desire, too obscene. When the Whitney Museum reopened in a brand-new building in 2015, the painter took pride of place in the room dedicated to pop art, a label he often refuted during his lifetime.

Of all his contemporaries, he is the unloved one. "He's one of the big three, along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein," said New York dealer Christophe Van de Weghe. His prices, however, are light years away from those of his peers. "While a Warhol masterpiece is worth $200 million and Lichtenstein's top $55 million, a great Wesselmann is $6 million! The price of a young artist who we don't know what he'll be worth in five years' time, whereas Wesselmann is history!" said Van de Weghe.

His colleague Emilio Steinberger, one of the directors of the New York gallery Lévy Gorvy, offered a tentative explanation: "He produced far less than the other two. For one Wesselmann, there are 15 Lichtensteins and 30 Warhols. People are reluctant to sell him. As a result, the market is bumpy." This is partly true, but it's not the only explanation.

Born in Ohio in 1931, Wesselmann first dreamed of becoming a cartoonist before asserting himself as an artist from 1961 with his Great American Nude series, a version of which was offered in June by Van de Weghe at the Art Basel fair for $5.5 million. Although he also painted men, with their genitals in close-up, the woman immediately appeared as an obsessive subject, the body delineated, circled, the limbs shattered puzzle-like. Even his frames followed female contours. Unlike his fellow Pop artists, who drew their female figures from magazines, he painted flesh-and-blood models like Henri Matisse, his absolute reference.

Wesselmann may be a worthy heir to the French painter, but his nudes are set in an entirely different context: the hedonism of the 1960s and American consumerism. Budweiser cans, milkshakes, 7-Ups, hamburgers – all the trappings of the American way of life feature in the background.

For a long time, the Wesselmann market was sluggish. His work, which overly fetishized the mouth (luscious, of course), the nipples, the pubis or bikini line, may have seemed repetitive, or worse, suspicious in the eyes of feminists. Wesselmann certainly embraced the sexual revolution: His women are liberated and orgasmic but devoid of a gaze. Associated with fruit or flowers like a simple still life, they appear to be there just to be looked at, women-objects in short.

You have 49.04% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.