The Aesthete As Popeye

(2 of 2)

You 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.

Nobody else in American art had such a strong sense of the sinister. It breathes through such early constructions as Mad House, 1958--a parody of the House of Horrors that isn't quite a parody because its contents are more subtle than you would expect, mere hauntings rather than the traces of death or dismemberment--yet affecting all the same, like an American Gothic version of early, Surrealist Giacometti.

In 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.

In the 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.