Word: westermann
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...Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is holding a marvelous retrospective of Westermann's work, the first in a generation (the last one was in 1978, at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art; he died only three years after). It comes with excellent catalog essays by Robert Storr, Dennis Adrian, Lynne Warren and Michael Rooks. It is a revelation, for it sets before us an artist who deserves to be rated as one of the great American talents, and should have been long ago; an aesthete of unshakable integrity who looked and talked like Popeye the Sailor...
...case, mostly wood)--gave a certain urgency and moral power to the object. He never seems to have had a slipshod moment. If you can imagine Jack Kerouac without the stupid sentimentality but with the assets of a truly fine craftsman, you might have had something like Westermann. But there was no other such person...
...immediately, to hell with the war & all that crap about what we are fighting for, etc? Well anyway the Korean War came along & I wanted to see if I was still a coward--I was!" By 1952, when he was discharged from the Marines, no one could have said Westermann had shirked his duties, despite various courts-martial for drunkenness, brawling and going AWOL...
...Westermann's art was shaped by the pressure of memory and the need to vent that pressure. But lots of bad art has been made about intense, violently authentic experience. What made Westermann such a good artist was the combination of discipline and intense feeling. An image he returned to, often and each time differently, was the Death Ship, a simple block of carved wood, sometimes afloat on a green sea of dollar bills, with the tiny dorsal fins of sharks implacably circling it. Death Ship Runover by a '66 Lincoln Continental, 1966, refers not to World...
...there is nothing crudely propagandistic about Westermann's war images. Like the rest of his work--except for the letters and drawings, which tend to be dirty and rawly funny--they are understated, oblique, and sneak up on you. They imply both sudden disasters and long cultural histories. Thus some of the Death Ships link back to the awful sense of abandonment envisaged by Coleridge in The Ancient Mariner, "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," or in their case a sculpted ship on a sculpted ocean. Who else would envisage, as a symbol of progress, an object...