Word: westermann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dresden for Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), the contradictory lunacies of command for Joseph Heller (Catch-22). This scarcely ever happened to American painters or sculptors. But to one in particular it did. It was war, as much as anything else, that made an artist out of H.C. (Horace Clifford) Westermann Jr., that imbued him with raucous suspicion of the "normal" life he was supposed to be defending and filled him with horrible sights, now bleak and now baroque, whose exorcism would become a lifetime task...
Puryear's work has the exact American-grain quality -- if not the episodic fussiness -- of that earlier virtuoso of the dovetail and the lamination, the sculptor H.C. Westermann. It also has some of Westermann's laconic humor. Sanctuary, 1982, is one such piece: a cubical box of thick wood mounted on two raw branches with the bark still on them, which turn out to be "legs," pedaling a wooden wheel -- a sort of absurd unicycle, designed for flight...
...western France, where counterrevolutionary rebellions in the Vendee, Brittany and Normandy were brutally put down, antipathy toward the revolution is widespread. Historian Chaunu calls the retribution "genocide." In 1793 General Francois Westermann had reported proudly to his government, "I have trampled the children under my horses' hooves. I have massacred the women so they will give birth to no more rebels." The new movie about the Vendee uprising, Vent de Galerne, has understandably garnered intense local support and money. Says Jean-Michel Mousset, a trucking-company owner from Ste.- Florence who put up $5,000: "In 1793 liberty, equality...
...mingled with self-mockery. Of course, Surls' sense of the demonic (or the angel ic, which makes a less convincing bow in one or two pieces) is filtered through quite a lot of art history, from Mini to the ornery, meticulously crafted constructions of the late H.C. Westermann. His main weakness is a penchant for cockeyed whimsy, which seems to be an inexpert deduction from Miro. But this hardly matters beside the strength of Surls' best work. Notably Working in the Garden, 1981, the massive root system of an oak dug from the ground, seasoned, and then equipped...
...horses, made from sticks, chicken wire and mud by the California artist Deborah Butterfield. There is also a hilarious piece of funkiness by a Texas sculptor, James Surls, representing a tornado chewing through the roof of a church; Surls' debt to that master of buckeye surrealism, H.C. Westermann, is ob vious enough, but the image has a wobbly comic-strip blatancy about it that carries conviction...