Art: The Aesthete As Popeye

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World War II gave some American writers images that burned deep to the core of their work and became, sometimes, its chief theme: the bombing of 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.

The 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 Man, a cigar-chomping wisecracker of diabolic humor whose curriculum vitae (timber worker, carpenter, sailor, U.S. Marine Corps marksman, acrobat, gandy dancer and voluble loner) was not, to put it mildly, of a kind normal in the art world.

Yet there was nothing affected about him; he was not playing a role. He was laconically and sometimes pugnaciously American. And he believed in the redeeming powers of craft: how making things well--no concessions, no shortcuts, with complete faith in the beauty and integrity of material (in his 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.

In 1945, having served two years as a gunner on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise in the Pacific, he watched another carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin, turned into an oven by a Japanese bombing attack, smelling the stench of more than 700 men slow-roasted alive between its steel decks. "After that," he wrote, "I became a f___ing coward & was ready to come home 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.