A Workingman’s Surrealist

You could say that H. C. Westermann became an artist on the morning of March 19, 1945. While serving as a marine gunner on the USS Enterprise during World War II, the twenty-two-year-old witnessed an enemy aircraft dive-bomb the nearby USS Franklin off the coast of Japan, killing more than seven hundred men—most of them broiled in the explosions, others asphyxiated by the rampant smoke and fuel vapor or drowned in the ocean. Westermann later recalled the “horrible smell of death” that seethed from that inferno—a smell that lingered in his imagination for decades as he transfigured the experience into sculptures, prints, and drawings of enigmatic brio.

A recurring image in Westermann’s work is the death ship: stalled, adrift, encroached on by sharks. He sometimes portrays it as a masted merchant ship, at other times as a metal-hulled freighter, hobbled in arctic ice or becalmed in a shabby sundown port. The death ship is his most autobiographical motif, though it hardly conveys the idiosyncrasy of his vision, which cribs from science fiction, pulp novels, and comic strips, alongside more canonical sources. His friend Ed Ruscha has described him as “a cross between Popeye and Dick Tracy,” while another friend, the critic Dennis Adrian, once called him “an odd amalgam of Herman Melville’s cursed wanderers, Raymond Chandler’s tough guys, and Walt Whitman’s solitary individualists.”

“Anchor Clanker,” a small but career-spanning exhibition of seventeen sculptures at the Art Institute of Chicago, samples Westermann’s various moods: witty, mordant, elusive. The show’s title is nautical slang for a sailor. Its occasion is a gift from the estate of Alan and Dorothy Press, the former of whom was a commodities trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The Presses began collecting art in the 1970s, concentrating first on Edvard Munch and German Expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, then expanding to more recent fare: Philip Guston, Ken Price, Ruscha, and Westermann.

The story “Anchor Clanker” tells is of an artist defiantly out of sync with coastal trends. While contemporaries such as Robert Motherwell and Ellsworth Kelly mined Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism, Westermann produced sculptures that flirt with narrative; in the heyday of slickly impersonal Pop Art and rigorous conceptual work by artists like Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, he remained devoted to building handmade objects from wood, sheet metal, linoleum, and other utilitarian stock. In an interview with Giampaolo Bianconi, the curator of “Anchor Clanker,” in the exhibition catalog, Ruscha recalled that Westermann made a series of functional dustpans and gave them out to friends as gifts. His output seems in tune with the wilder offshoots of West Coast Funk and Assemblage, although these categories imply a makeshift quality that his impeccable constructions lack.

Today you can see affinities with Westermann’s work in the cartoonish drawings of Roy De Forest, the satirical mixed-media sculptures of Marisol, and the welded scrap-metal forms of Richard Stankiewicz. His influence radiates through the art of peers such as Billy Al Bengston, Richard Artschwager, and Robert Arneson, as well as that of the insouciant younger generation of Chicago Imagists, for whom he was a hometown hero. Yet even if he no longer comes across as the iconoclast he was during his lifetime, he remains a misfit in the art historical canon, a workingman’s surrealist or a carpenter schooled in Dada. He signed much of his work with his initials and an anchor, a personal trademark, and hid his biting humor about militarism and consumerism in barfly puns and jokes. Walnut Box (1964)—a walnut box containing, naturally, walnuts—is one tongue-in-cheek example: a riposte to art world pretension and materialism alike. “If you can imagine Jack Kerouac without the stupid sentimentality but with the assets of a truly fine craftsman,” the critic Robert Hughes put it in 2001, “you might have had something like Westermann. But there was no other such person.”   

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Horace Clifford Westermann was born in Los Angeles in 1922. He was named after his father, an accountant for hotels who was often on the road, leaving his son and two daughters in the care of their mother, Florita. Worried that her son was physically frail, Florita “took it upon herself to personally design and build a peculiar piece of equipment for him in the backyard consisting of retaining cables, climbing ropes, and a trapeze,” writes the scholar Ana Merino in H. C. Westermann: Goin’ Home, the catalog for a 2019 exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Perhaps that early regimen helped shape Westermann’s later stint as an acrobat and his lifelong habit of walking on his hands.

Florita urged her son to enroll in military school. He did but left in December 1941 when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis; she died in a sanitarium the following spring at the age of forty-two. By then Westermann had gone to northern California to work on the railroad and in logging camps. That July he enlisted in the Marines, eventually volunteering as an antiaircraft gunner in the Pacific.

At sea he developed his artistic instincts, embellishing his letters home with sketches and making drawings that recorded scenes from the war. Just two months after the dive-bombing of the USS Franklin, Westermann’s own ship suffered a kamikaze attack that killed fourteen crew members and wounded dozens more. He commemorated it in a pen-and-ink drawing that depicts the ship listing as a plane nose-dives overhead. Streaking motion lines borrowed from the visual grammar of comic strips indicate the plane’s plunge, though the image otherwise remains almost naturalistic by Westermann’s standards.

In 1946, unmoored after being discharged, Westermann returned stateside. While working out in Long Beach one day, he met Wayne Uttley, a fellow fitness enthusiast, and together they devised a hand-balancing act that toured Asia with the United Service Organizations (USO), entertaining American troops. When the tour ended, Westermann enrolled at the school at the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill, to study applied art. In 1951 he reenlisted in the Marines and headed to Korea for another yearlong tour of duty, after which he resumed his studies at the Art Institute.

His Chicago circle included a cohort of artists that came to be known as the Monster Roster. Named by the local critic Franz Schulze, the Monsters shared an existentialist outlook and a visual roughness that recalled the art brut of Jean Dubuffet. In Seymour Rosofsky’s Unemployment Agency (1957–1958), for example, postwar nihilism congeals with sinister comedy: figures in fedoras, seen from behind, wait in an apparently endless, possibly deserted, bureaucratic purgatory. (Bafflingly, Rahm Emanuel hung this painting behind his desk when he was mayor of Chicago.)

The Monsters’ preference for figuration and expressive intensity over abstraction made them oddities, celebrated in Chicago but mostly overlooked by the New York cognoscenti. Among this group, Westermann’s mix of craftsmanship and playfulness set him apart still further. Other local combat-veteran artists such as Cosmo Campoli, Leon Golub, George Cohen, and Theodore Halkin produced murkier and more self-serious work. Nonetheless, Golub, Campoli, and Westermann were included in “New Images of Man,” a much-ballyhooed but polarizing exhibition at MoMA in 1959. In The New York Times, the art critic John Canaday singled out Westermann’s contributions as “stale Dada concoctions,” sneering: “He is just a guest who has arrived in a clown suit, forty years late for a costume party, to find a formal dinner in progress.”

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The earliest sculpture in “Anchor Clanker,” Uncommitted Little Chicago Child (1957), already shows Westermann’s attention to detail and affection for wordplay. This short humanoid figure fashioned from varnished wood is armless, its small round head implanted with a metal clockface and a coin-slot mouth. Peer into the hole in its chest from a low angle and you’ll glimpse a paper decoupage of two blond Victorian cherubs. Westermann was fond of secret compartments and decorative marginalia; he sometimes annotated his sculptures with notes recording their materials, dates, places of production, and instructions for handling (“carefully!!”). Here, the side of the little urchin is etched with the title and an all-caps gloss for anyone who needs it (“Commit—to put in trust or custody”). And, perhaps most characteristic of Westermann, it lists the kind of wood used: “Med. Oak—Maple.”

Westermann once called wood his “whole life.” It was not only the primary medium of his sculptures but also a link to a craft tradition that ran counter to the era’s avalanche of mass-produced goods. Wood is a no-nonsense material, yet when placed in service of dreamlike or hallucinatory images, it contradicts its nature. In Westermann’s hands, it transforms into something soft or strange, giving rise to the ineffability that defines his work. In The Big Change (1963), the wood in question is marine-grade Douglas fir plywood, coerced into an imposing, upright knot and looking more elastic than timber ever should. The sculpture may be a pun on “tying the knot,” a reference to Westermann’s marriage to the painter Joanna Beall—or the “change” could signal something more oblique, as is often the case with Westermann. What the sculpture ultimately stages is a material riddle: the wood almost appears to have been transmogrified and yet refuses to reveal what has changed.

I first saw “Anchor Clanker” last May. When I visited again in late August, The Big Change had been deinstalled so that it could be shipped to New York for the Whitney’s “Sixties Surreal” exhibition (it also appears on the cover of that show’s catalog). In its place stood Angry Young Machine (1959), inspired by British writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne who in the 1950s were labeled the Angry Young Men for their disillusionment with the rigid postwar class system. In this aluminum-painted sculpture, Westermann combines wood (pine and plywood), found objects (a toy soldier, a metal bird), and household fixtures (a faucet and plumbing pipes) to make an eyeless, noseless ogre who looks more whimsical than indignant, an effect heightened by its oversized red lips and lolling tongue. According to the curatorial label, the lips allude to a Chicago carpet-cleaning company, most likely Magikist, whose logo was once ubiquitous on the city’s expressway billboards. A small-scale skyscraper caps the head, as if commerce, industry, and working-class angst have collided in this mutant being with ambiguous sympathies. What, exactly, is the source—or target—of its anger? And what does it produce? A painted black snake coils up one of the pipes, perhaps symbolizing deception, although it’s unclear who is being deceived—the machine or its viewer.      

If Angry Young Machine recombines household fixtures into a beguiling other, Little Egypt (1969) achieves its uncanniness by defamiliarizing a common wooden object—a door. Westermann built it by hand from Douglas fir, pine, oak, and bronze, but its proportions are subtly askew: the step up is a bit too high, the frame a bit too short. Despite these quirks, it looks unremarkable. Approach it slantwise, though, and it becomes clear that the door stands alone, anchored only to its pedestal, an architectural conundrum that opens onto nothing, at once an entrance and a cliffhanger. Little Egypt was a nickname for Southern Illinois, and also the stage name of various belly dancers—most notably Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, a Syrian performer who lived in Chicago and was an inspiration for the 1951 film Little Egypt. Westermann’s appropriation of the moniker is perhaps a joke. What could be less “exotic” than Southern Illinois? And what’s a less erotic homage to belly dancing than a wooden door?

Philosophical subtext is there for viewers who care to decode it, but Westermann, ever the populist, had little patience for the abstraction and obfuscation that dominated much contemporary art. His irreverence is apparent in Hutch the One Armed Astro-Turf Man with a Defense (1976), a figure made of pine, aspen, ash, and chestnut, with a wooden boxing glove instead of a head. Hutch’s left arm is amputated above the elbow and he’s clad in astroturf, which, introduced in 1965, metastasized rapidly across America’s stadiums and public spaces, becoming a bête noire for environmentalists who saw it as a harbinger of the synthetic future. He’s both ridiculous and pathetic, a figure of thwarted masculinity.

Other sculptures reveal a darker, terser sensibility. Rotting Jet Wing (1966) consists of a pale pine slab displayed in a vitrine, as if it were a specimen from a medical science museum or a sideshow. Its shape resembles that of a plane wing, but with a bulbous protuberance where the engine might be, lending the sculpture an organic peculiarity. The curatorial label points out that it “looks chemically stripped of the hallmarks of Westermann’s craftsmanship—no high-gloss surface, no smooth finish. Instead the jet wing is violently exposed, pale, and almost skeletal.” Once again Westermann has transformed a familiar object into something inscrutable.

Westermann’s final sculpture, Jack of Diamonds (1981), is a humanesque body made of galvanized sheet metal and wire lath. About six and a half feet tall, Jack stands poised on his wooden base, as though paused mid-stride, his woven form see-through except for a trapdoor on his back, a cousin to The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man. Scholars have noted that among Westermann’s visual inspirations are films like Rocketship X-M (1950) and Red Planet Mars (1952), which may account for the flaming space capsules and unidentifiable species that populate some of his prints. Like the robots of sci-fi B-movies, Jack is a walking anachronism, simultaneously rustic and futuristic.

Jack’s exposed trapdoor also echoes the portals seen elsewhere in Westermann’s work—from Uncommitted Little Chicago Child’s secret cubbyhole of cherubs to Little Egypt’s perversely proportioned door. Not unlike the death ships that haunt Westermann’s oeuvre, Jack of Diamonds strikes a precarious balance between vulnerability and resilience, bearing traces of both menace and whimsy.

The materials used to create Jack of Diamonds were left over from the construction site in Brookfield, Connecticut, where Westermann and his wife spent years building a house and studios by hand on land inherited from her parents. Across his career, Westermann repeatedly returned to ideas of shelter and refuge. Beatriz Velázquez, one of the curators of the Madrid exhibition, argues that his entire body of work boils down to “a discontinuous but sustained and interminable quest to go (or go back) home.” He often depicted sanctuaries that appeared somehow threatened or damaged: he boarded up the windows of The Mysteriously Abandoned New Home (1958), covered Mad House (1958) with odd apertures that seem to lead nowhere, and put The Old Eccentric’s House (1956–1957) catty-corner to a strange, mirrored obelisk of uncertain purpose.

It should hardly be surprising that a man who lost his mother when he was on the cusp of adulthood, and who came of age under the shadow of the atomic bomb, enduring the atrocities of wartime, should have yearned for a refuge, however idealized or improbable. Westermann wrote to his sister Martha in 1976 after visiting the site of their childhood house in Los Angeles: 

You know there’s just nothing there anymore—I mean where our home used to be. Well that was a traumatic experience. It was like we had never had a home or a family or even been born—none of us. I think its awful the things they do + once around is enough for me.

He died of a heart attack in 1981, in Connecticut, a few miles from the wooden house he had almost completed. He never got to move in.