Word: westermann
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...artists were comic-strip heroes, Horace Clifford Westermann would be Popeye. The gimlet stare, the laconic speech, the cigar stub jutting like a bowsprit from the face, the seafaring background and fo'c'sle oaths, the muscular arm-all are there. He signs his work with an anchor; and Westermann's age, 55, is about right too. What the comparison lacks, of course, is the talent. Westermann's retrospective of 59 sculptures and 24 drawings, which runs until mid-July at the Whitney Museum in New York and then goes on a tour of museums...
...popular allusions to folk and fairground art. Its imagery is redolent of the fun house, the ghost train, the penny arcade -these small environments of illusion whose hold on the imagination, over the past 25 years, has been so drastically loosened by the encompassing phantoms of TV and movies. Westermann can imbue a model of a building, a little ship's hull or a box with extreme suspense: one peers through the glass at a scene that resembles the inverted world of the fun fair, but concentrated (and made epigrammatic) by its littleness. The box serves...
...fabric stripes in a breeze, inevitably suggests Jasper Johns' flag paintings, but that is only an accident. Likewise, a deliciously anthropomorphic wool winder (see cut), with a human head and the hub of a decorated worm gear for its belly button, predicts the surreal wooden constructions of H.C. Westermann. And then there are the quilts. The best products of America's 19th century women quilt makers anticipate many of the formal devices and color systems of Op art and color-field painting. Seen with an unprejudiced eye, the snap and sparkle of the piecework Cactus Rose-pattern quilt...
...sense it is misleading to speak of a Chicago School, for many of the better artists in the show-including Leon Golub, H.C. Westermann and James Nutt-left the Midwest years ago. "Chicago has long been a wholesale supplier of talent to New York," writes Art Critic Franz Schulze, in a briskly readable introduction to the group, entitled "Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945." He continues...
...Westermann's images are radically different. They are both limpid and mysterious, and this is largely the result of Westermann's loving attention to craft. He manipulates his repertory of boxes, laminations, dovetails, locks, hinges and clamps with unerring finesse. The effect-as in the absurd log-cabin toy tower that rises, with a metal swan flapping from its crenelations, inside the box called Battle of Little Jack's Creek, 1970-is to convince you of the utter reality, the solid presence, of a completely surreal world, pinned and glued at all its joints and present...