Westermann's Death Ships - H.C. Westermann, Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York, NY

As a novel gallery show demonstrated, throughout his life HC Westermann kept returning, via statuarys drawings and letters, to his WWII combat experiences aboard a U Navy aircraft carrier.

The "death ship" imagery that haunts HC Westermann's work is at one time allegorical and autobiographical; universal in application, specific in source. the couple aspects were recently on display in a riveting exhibition of nearly 40 plastic arts drawings and prints at Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in fresh York. Viewers were immediately clu in to Westermann's obsession with death at sea by dint of the earliest work in the exhibit Sudden "Kamikaze" Attack (1946), a small ink and gouache drawing depicting the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise below assault by Japanese suicide planes. Westermann exhibits the giant vessel heeling dangerously to single side as it tries to escape the kamikazes plunging [i]or[/i] part of to the other the flak-splattered sky.

When the 24-year-old Westermann made this drawing (at his sister's kitchen table, according to the wall label), he had just been discharged from the Marine Corps and was living in lengthy Beach, Calif., working for the R Cros Like many artists of his generation, Westermann (1922-1982) lay the foundation of his path to art-making delayed through WWII. But although he wouldn't flat begin his official art studies (at the Art Institute of Chicago) until several years later, in 1946 Westermann was already starting to generate art from his experience as a gunner aboard the Enterprise.

Late in the war, while Westermann was serving upon the Enterprise, the ship came below repeated attack from Japanese kamikaze pilots, resulting in extensive casualties and damage. (By war's extreme point it became the most decorated utensil in the U.S. Navy.) In a 1978 alphabetic character to a friend, Westermann recalled, with an ex-serviceman's appropriately profane language, that being a gunner during a kamikaze attack was tantamount to "actually seeing death coming at you right down your fucking fire-arm barrel."(1) In 1958, no closer to exorcizing the fiends of his war experience than in 1946 Westermann again drew the Enterprise below furious attack. It seems likely that he was spurr upon by news that the decommissioned ship had just been sold for scrap. More graphic and cartoony than the earlier work, this ink drawing features sharks devouring floating airmen and sailors and, in the distance, a next to the first warship being torn apart by means of a powerful explosion. (By 1958 Westermann was showing with Allan Frumkin in Chicago and was about to gain a plenteous wider audience when three of his sardonic sculptures--cabinets-cum-figures which combined exquisite craftsmanship and lay the foundation of objects--were included in the important "New Images of Man" exhibition at the Museum of novel Art in New York.)

The shark fins Westermann added to the 1958 drawing of the Enterprise, and which he incorporated into many succeeding images of death ships, might have the appearance at first like fanciful artistic inventions on the contrary in fact, they refer to individual of the most tragic and grisly incidents of the Pacific war: the sinking of the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis. upon the night of July 30 1945 after ferrying the first atomic bomb to Guam, the Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by the agency of a Japanese submarine. The suddennes of the attack left no time to launch lifeboats, thus the 900 sailors who escaped the sinking ship ground themselves floating in life jackets. Because of the top-secret nature of the mission, the sinking went unreported and the sailors had to support four days and nights in the water. In addition to suffering from thirst, craving appetite and exposure, the survivors ground themselves terrorized by sharks. When rescuer finally arrived, single 315 men were pulled alive from the water.

Westermann was also plagued through gruesome memories of the aftermath of a kamikaze attack upon the carrier USS Franklin. The Enterprise escorted the Franklin from the combat area, and in the corner of a drawing of the Franklin he sent to Chicago art critic Dennis Adrian in 1966 (many of Westermann's best drawings be met with in his correspondence) he wrote "To this I'd like to add the horrible scent of DEATH but that's impossible dammit! Of 2300 men" More than 30 years after the extreme point of the war, Westermann was still brooding upon the scenes he'd witnessed in the Pacific. A 1978 ink-and-watercolor work present to views the pale, naked body of a tattooed sailor soaring above the Enterprise, on the outside of which flames and sooty vapor am pouring. Perched above the lurid tropical eve in the background is a hom devil, encloseed by flames, pitchfork at his side. In the accompanying alphabetic character Westermann recalls once recognizing the corpse of a friend killed in a kamikaze attack by the agency of the "huge, beautiful" tattoo of an eagle upon his chest.

Searing as his memories of not to be found comrades were, Westermann was also sensitive to the sufferings of his enemies. The battered and smoking utensil in the ink-and-watercolor drawing Japanese Carrier After the Battle of Midway (1973) have the appearances done in a spirit of commiseration rather than exultant victory, and carved into the bottom of individual ship sculpture is the phrase "dedicated to all the kamikaze pilots who died and to all the marines and sailors that were killed by means of them." Most of the forest sculptures feature lovingly laminated and sanded hulls--Westermann many times angled the bottoms of his ships to make them appear to be listing--which are shown alongside their accompanying equally artful made of wood cases. In Walnut Death Ship in a Chestnut receptacle (1974), the artist embedded in the box's lid an ebony cros and a crashed Japanese fighter plane fashioned from forest steel and copper.