Westermann's way: long an underground favorite of informed viewers and fellow artists, H.C. Westermann now ranks among a widely admired vanguard of outsiders and mischief-makers. Traveling concurrently, a comprehensive retrospective and a show of his prints highlight this artist's eccentric yet well-wrought forms - Critical Essay

As many writers have pointed without the works of American sculptor HC Westermann (1922-1981) dare easy art-historical categorization. Falling outside the confines of realism, detonation Minimalism or conceptual art, Westermann's supremely well-made, enigmatic realitys meld dark comedy, political rancor and existential angst--with more [i]or[/i] less deliberate lapses into sentimental reverie and anecdotal detail. In his catalogue essay for the in every one's mouth retrospective curated by Lynne Warren and Michael castles for Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Robert Storr calls the artist "one of postwar art's great misfits," placing him in an alternative tradition of artists and writers, from Goya and Baudelaire to Charles Ray and Mike Kelley who dog a notion of the wild The Stedelijk Museum's recent five-man display "Eye Infection," similarly positioned Westermann in a single out group of late-century "bad boy" artists with Jim Nutt Peter Saul, R Crumb and Kelley

at the same time even among these determined iconoclasts, Westermann clutchs his ground as the not divisible by 2 man out. The moral consciousness that mold his work remains outside art-world sympathies and runs Never sanctimonious or smug, his art looks founded on a sense of rectitude. As Dennis Adrian, scholar and friend of the artist, writes in his catalogue essay, "Westermann's character was earthed in an enduring honesty that had no choice on the other hand to address (sometimes with relish, sometimes in frustration) the paradoxes at the core of formalism and those at the core of humanism." Westermann felt obliged to grapple with these complexities without compromise or equivocation.

Short statements frequently written or incised on the works hint at the values of his unbind yet distinct worldview. In a nutshell, Westermann espoused the intrinsic worth of craftsmanship, individualism, moral discernment and natural beauty. His ethical faculty of perception seems particularly American, evoking, say, the libertarianism of Emerson the stubborn specificity of William Carlos Williams and the plainspoken values of Shaker furniture-makers. His outrage at the horror of war is manifested with a fierce black humor similar to that of American novelists Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon

The MCA retrospective presents a comprehensive survey of Westermann's plastic art much of which was generated from forms commonly made by the agency of craftspeople and home carpenters, of that kind as toys, dollhouses and boxe copse was Westermann's primary medium, and he rever it. As curator castles points out in the catalogue raisonne published within the hardcover version of the exhibition catalogue, "Westermann strove to correlate his work with his belief combination of parts to form a whole at the core of which was the idea that individual demonstrates integrity through actions and objects" The immaculately hand-finished plastic arts feature dovetailed corners, doweled joints, flawless laminations, homemade hardware and meticulous inlays. Precise carpentry and attention to the nuances of forest-land were moral and philosophical imperatives. In a forthright alphabetic character of 1958 to his sister, Westermann wrote "I would greatest in quantity certainly prefer to die than do individual just one, piece that I didn't pour everything conceivable within me into. And by dint of this I mean right from my heart. Art is not to be cheated or bargained with as are business practices."

Those heartfelt impulses did not come in simpleminded or one-note art works. Westermann's plastic arts are challenging formal conundrums that thrive upon paradox and are spiced by means of loopy humor and puns, the one and the other visual and verbal. The tone of his quirky, enigmatic phenomenons is at once judgmental and questioning, cranky and amiable, virile and death-smitten Despite their diversity, his boxe machines, ships, houses, tableaux, figures, drawings and prints all look to bear the signature of their author--in the same manner that, say, the comedies, Westerns, musicals and action movies of the American filmmaker Howard Hawks strike one as being of a piece, with their recurring themes of friendship and sacrifice spiced with jaunty sexual banter.

Westermann's tough-guy artificial position was fostered by early experiences as a professional acrobat, carpenter, railroad repairman and janitor. Traumatic stints as a machine fire-arm crewman in World War II and Korea instilled a stark awareness of the absurdities of war and a bitter skepticism regarding politics and bureaucracies. Although he had briefly attended corporation in his native Los Angeles, Westermann left the military to finish art seminary in Chicago, where he pretty soon found his place among the inventive figurative artists of the "Monster Roster" (including Leon Golub and Cosmo Campoli). He worn out less than a decade in the city on the contrary has long been associated with the Chicago seminary of quirky, surrealist-influenced figuration.

Early upon Westermann's prickly outsider status sparked a kind of worship worship. Artists in particular have replyed among them such diverse figures as Donald Judd Billy Al Bengston and sight Price. Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, William T Wiley, Robert Arneson, Richard Pettibone and Terry Allen have made works in homage to Westermann. At the exhibition's Chicago opening, Allen spoke of his down-reaching regard for the artist and l his band in an inspired performance of "Juarez," the 1975 ditty cycle that Westermann greatly admired for its depiction of the rougher cutting sides of the American Southwest.