Word: westermann
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...hard to imagine anyone's actually disliking Westermann. You would need to be blind not to realize what a talent he had--sardonic, passionate, always invigorating, at times touched by real genius and always, totally, himself...
Which other artists did he resemble? Not many, it turns out. Miro, in brief flashes. You could think of Westermann's strand of buckeye Surrealism and make him out to be a wood-butchering cousin of Joseph Cornell's, except that he didn't have Cornell's haunted preciousness, his extended nostalgia for a dream Europe. While Cornell was fantasizing about long-dead French courtesans like Cleo de Merode and building mossy palaces for paper owls, Westermann was chopping dovetails, perfect ones at that, and constructing scary, haunting emblems of death, loss and love...
...could relate him to that great American junkmeister Robert Rauschenberg, his contemporary, except that the whole tenor of his imagination was different, being based on handmaking, on high-intensity craft, rather than on semirandom assemblies of street detritus. Which is not to say that Westermann was a better or a worse artist than Rauschenberg--just wholly different, not least because of the dark side of his work...
...some ways, as Storr points out in his richly sympathetic catalog introduction, the artist to whom Westermann was closest in spirit was that exquisitely sophisticated Polish emigre Elie Nadelman, whose delicate, elegantly refined figures inspired by American folk art seem to underwrite many of Westermann's coarser and more colloquial ones in their ecstatically precise finish...
...past, Westermann may have seemed too quirky, colloquial and weird to be, as people used to say, "major." He no longer does. But it's the dark side of Westermann that makes him live, 20 years after his death. Carpenters build houses. Westermann's small houses were habitations for the soul--and traps for it as well...