John Wesley (November 25, 1928 – February 10, 2022) was an American painter, known for idiosyncratic figurative works of eros and humor, rendered in a precise, hard-edged, deadpan style.
[Kennedy, Randy]
''The New York Times'', February 10, 2022. Retrieved September 26, 2022.[Greenberger, Alex]
"John Wesley, Painter of Pop-Inflected Paintings with a Bite, Dies at 93,"
''ARTnews'', February 10, 2022. Retrieved September 26, 2022.[Plagens, Peter]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', May 1998. Retrieved September 27, 2022. Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a
comic-strip
A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics ter ...
style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared-down compositions.
[Smith, Roberta]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', November 28, 2003. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Pagel, David]
''Los Angeles Times'', October 22, 1992. Retrieved September 27, 2022. His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair.
[Schwendener, Martha]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', March 2004. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Hickey, Dave]
"Touché Boucher: John Wesley's Gallant Subjects,"
''Artforum'', October 2000. Retrieved September 26, 2022.[Johnson, Ken]
''The New York Times'', November 25, 2005. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Borum, Jenifer P]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', Summer 1991. Retrieved September 27, 2022.
Early on, art critics categorized Wesley as a
Pop artist, due to his appropriation of the visual language and, at times, iconography of popular culture.
[Kennedy, Randy]
"Pop and Rococo Meet and Greet,"
''The New York Times'', June 8, 2009. Retrieved September 26, 2022. Later critics, however, regarded him as an art outsider whose work eluded categorization, noting among other things, his psychological plumbing of a (largely male) American unconscious, formal affinities with
abstraction, and wide-ranging art-historical borrowings.
[Kimmelman, Michael]
"Wesley's Decorative Slant Lurks Amid the Abstract,"
''The New York Times'', March 20, 1990. Retrieved September 28, 2022.[Scott, Andrea K]
''The New York Times'', January 19, 2007. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Norden, Linda]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', September 2009. Retrieved September 27, 2022. ''Artforums Jenifer Borum described Wesley's work as combining "a Pop vocabulary, a refined
Minimal sensibility, and a surrealistic proclivity for uncanny juxtapositions,"
while
Dave Hickey likened him to an eighteenth-century
Rococo
Rococo (, also ), less commonly Roccoco or Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, ...
"fabulist," citing his penchant for erotic narrative.
Wesley's work has been exhibited at the
Whitney Museum of American Art,
[Smith, Roberta]
"Extraordinary Realities,"
''Artforum'', January 1974. Retrieved September 27, 2022. MoMA PS1,
[Kimmelman, Michael]
"Comforting, Funny Outlandishness That Sticks to Its Own Logic,"
''The New York Times'', December 1, 2000. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. ,
Portikus (Frankfurt), and the
Chinati Foundation, among others.
[Stedelijk Museum]
John Wesley
Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2022.[Chinati Foundation]
John Wesley
Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2022. It belongs to public art collections including the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
,
[Museum of Modern Art]
John Wesley
Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...
,
[Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles]
John Wesley
Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2022. and Whitney Museum.
[Whitney Museum of American Art]
John Wesley
Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2022. In 1976, he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
.
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
John Wesley
Retrieved September 28, 2022.
Life and career
John Mercer Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1928, to Elsa Marie Patzwaldt and Ner Wesley.
In 1934, he discovered his father at home, dead of a stroke—an event that had a profoundly traumatic, long-term impact on him.
[Bently, Kyle. "John Wesley," ''Art in America'', November 4, 2015.] Afterwards, he lived in an orphanage for a year, until his mother remarried and assumed custody.
[''Artforum'']
"John Wesley (1928–2022,"
February 9, 2022. Retrieved September 28, 2022. He began to make
abstract expressionist
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
paintings in the early 1950s despite a lack of any formal art training, eventually taking evening art classes while working blue-collar jobs as a dishwasher, warehouse stocker and aircraft riveter.
[Green, Hannah]
''A Journal in Praise of the Art of John Wesley,''
''The Unmuzzled Ox'', vol. II, No. 3, 1974, p. 46-65. Retrieved September 27, 2022.
Over the next decade, two jobs directly influenced his early painting. In 1953, he began a five-year employment in the illustration department at
Northrop Aircraft Corporation, where he simplified blueprints into drawings; in 1960, he moved to New York with his second wife, the minimalist painter
Jo Baer
Josephine Gail Baer (born August 7, 1929) is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned ...
, and took a job as a postal clerk.
Drawing on both experiences, he incorporated simple, functional line, matte cyanotype-blue color and iconic postal forms (shields, stamps, seals) in banner- and plaque-like paintings influenced by the deadpan imagery of
Jasper Johns and related to work by Pop artists
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. Hi ...
,
James Rosenquist and
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
.
[Judd, Donald. "John Wesley," ''Arts Magazine'', April 1963.][Taft, Catherine]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', September 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2022. During this period Wesley developed close closest personal affiliations with minimalist artists
Donald Judd,
Dan Flavin,
Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930February 8, 2019) was an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He was best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lived and worked in New York C ...
and
Sol Lewitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.
LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he pref ...
.
[Green, Hannah and John Wesley]
"Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular: Donald Judd,"
''Artforum'', Summer 1994. Retrieved September 27, 2022. Despite outward disparities in their approaches, Judd and Flavin were longtime supporters of Wesley's work; Judd reserved permanent space for Wesley’s paintings alongside well-known minimalist works at his Chinati Foundation complex in
Marfa, Texas.
[''Artforum'']
"Thomas Kellein to Direct Chinati Foundation,"
August 18, 2010. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
Wesley's early exhibition history included group shows at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...
(1959);
Oakland Art Museum
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay ...
(1963); three American Federation of the Arts international traveling shows (1966–8); the 1968–9 Whitney Painting Annual (precursor to its
biennial);
Documenta 5 (1972); and solo shows at Robert Elkon Gallery (1963–84).
[Heiss, Alanna]
''John Wesley: Paintings 1961-2000''
Long Island City, NY: PS1 Contemporary Art Center, 2000. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Alloway. Lawrence]
"'Reality': Ideology at D5,"
‘''Artforum'', October 1972. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Frank, Peter. ''John Wesley at Elkon,'' ''Art in America'', May–June 1074, p. 106–7.][Raynor, Vivien. "John Wesley," ''The New York Times'', June 1, 1984.] In his later career, surveys of Wesley's work were held at the Stedelijk Museum (1993, travelling to Portikus);
MoMA PS1 (2000, organized by
Alanna Heiss);
the Harvard Art Museums (Sert Gallery, 2001, organized by Linda Norden); Chinati Foundation (2004);
Kunsthalle Nürnberg
The Kunsthalle Nürnberg is an art centre founded in 1967, near the city centre. It organizes exhibitions by contemporary international artists in its galleries in Nuremberg. The Kunsthalle commissions new work by a majority of the artists it wo ...
(2006);
Fondazione Prada (2009);
and in several exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser in New York.
[Maine, Stephen. "John Wesley at Fredericks & Freiser," ''Art in America'', May 2007.] The Prada show was curated by
Germano Celant as part of the
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...
and featured 150 works.
[Celant, Germano, Bill Barrette and John Wesley]
''John Wesley''
Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2009.
Work and reception
Throughout his career, Wesley appropriated popular media imagery for his work. Critics, however, have deemed his recontextualizations more discomfiting and peculiar than those of Pop art, arguing that his style was largely a point of departure for subtle investigations of form and psychological content.
They have identified several key distinctions in his work: its poetic mix of charm and trauma, sweetness and underlying eroticism;
[Schjeldahl, Peter]
''The New York Times'', January 7, 1973. Retrieved September 26, 2022. preoccupations with personal memory, desire and fantasy rather than consumer, commercial and industrial imagery;
and the breadth of his
bricolage
In the arts, ''bricolage'' ( French for "DIY" or "do-it-yourself projects") is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.
The term ''bricolage'' ...
, which nodded toward sources including ancient friezes and vase painting, Japanese art,
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...
,
Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known prima ...
, historical representation and contemporary wallpaper patterns.
Although Wesley disliked explaining his work or being didactic,
his jarring couplings (e.g., human-animal) and Minimalist-like repetitions of figures—repositioned and manipulated in paper-doll fashion in rows or patterns—suggest elusive narratives, deeply personal, mysterious meanings and irreverent social content.
[Johnson, Ken]
"John Wesley: Important Works From 1961 to 1966,”
''The New York Times'', May 28, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2022.[Hainley, Bruce]
"John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', April 2007.Retrieved September 27, 2022. Elaborating on his reading of Wesley as a fabulist, Dave Hickey wrote that Wesley "reinvented the casual, libidinous allegories of Rococo painting" for use as veiled, urbane commentary directed at the contemporary hegemony of Puritan values in America,
while curator
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev noted, "Under the surface of his absurd utterances, a scathing commentary on society, superficiality, power or abuse can be found, if one only wants to look for it."
[Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. "," i]
''John Wesley: Paintings 1961-2000''
by Alanna Heiss, Long Island City, NY: PS1 Contemporary Art Center, 2000. Retrieved September 27, 2022.
Early work
Wesley's visual fixations and style registered their strange, idiosyncratic qualities as early as 1963. He placed cartoonish, expressively posed group and individual portraits and historical figures in vacant spaces, framed by symmetrical, Art Nouveau-like borders of flowers, birds or—in ''The Aviator’s Daughters'' (1963)—silhouetted World War I biplanes, creating a counterpoint of masculine and feminine.
[Stiles, Knute]
"Richard Van Buren and 'G.O.P. Show,'"
''Artforum'', September 1964. Retrieved September 27, 2022. In the middle of the decade, this imagery gave way to unsettling erotic paintings of nude and semi-clothed figures (often seemingly oblivious women) and personified animals—frogs, camels, bears, apes, birds, squirrels—some arranged in repetitive frieze-like formations with flat-painted borders.
Among these works were: ''Dream of Frogs'' (1965), featuring a languorous nude female reclining above three laughing pink frogs; ''Camel'' (1966), a horse-headed man and double-humped camel aggressively coupled; and "Gluttony" (1969), which depicted five shapely legs protruding from the bill of a Donald Duck-like character.
In the 1970s, Wesley began to turn toward domestic scenarios that
David Pagel later described as "loving dissections of ambiguity and double meaning."
In formal terms, these paintings were characterized by a freer use of line, more open compositions, and intensified color palettes dominated by candy pinks, baby blues, flesh beiges and hospital greens;
[Waxman, Lori]
"Critic's Picks: John Wesley,"
''Artforum'', 2004. Retrieved September 27, 2022. thematically, they often took a farcical, yet incisive look at gender relations, paternal power and mortality.
''Suzanna and the Lugosis (May I Cut In?)'' (1972) portrayed a pale, languishing woman in the arms of a tuxedoed, pink vampire, with three identical but paler vampires lining up behind him.
In ''Daddy’s Home'' (1972), Wesley duplicated a gleeful daughter figure five times, the repetition transforming an expression of uncontrollable delight into one that seemed to suggest a demonic grimace and dependence as a weapon.
Peter Schjeldahl wrote that this work signaled "a sharp, decidedly eccentric angle of vision" situated "more or less queasily, at some point on the continuum from funny‐ha‐ha to funny‐peculiar."
Later work
Around 1973, Wesley began a long engagement (extending into the 2000s) with popular 1950s characters from comic strips such as ''Blondie'', ''Popeye'' and ''Dennis the Menace''.
A particular preoccupation was the cowlicked,
Chic Young character Dagwood Bumstead, from ''Blondie'', who critics such as Linda Norden wrote, functioned as a stand-in for Wesley’s missing father, allowing him to access the people, domestic spaces and pathos of his childhood.
He placed these comics characters in ambiguous, often-primal and darkly humorous scenarios through which he explored eroticism, frustration, terror, despair or violence within mundane, everyday life.
Representative early comics-based works included ''Olive Oyl'' (1973), which presented that character nude, slumbering and floating with four angry, pointing infant Swee'Pea characters straddling her; ''Popeye'' (1973), a gun-wielding boy kidnapping a helpless Wimpy; and ''The Bumsteads'' (1974), which depicted Blondie sprawled across a bed, face-down and crying, bent-legged and bottomless, her foot partially covering Dagwood's face, as he leaned over from behind, his next move unclear.
Wesley's later "Bumstead" paintings "fixed on the neurotic, erotically inclined psyche of the American male,"
examining themes of insatiable desire and frustration, inadequacy and mediocrity, rage, longing and loss.
He reversed conventional gender roles in paintings like ''Off His Feed'' (1991), portraying a nude, possibly impotent Dagwood lying passive while an attentive Blondie tickled his toes; in ''Bumstead, Maddened by the Mistral, Fighting for His Knife'' (1990), two Dagwoods struggled over a murder weapon, while in ''Bumstead in Bedlam'' (1991) Wesley's Dagwood appeared in a straitjacket.
In the 2000s, he added a new twist to the Dagwood works, incorporating a female character that paid homage to the Japanese
ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...
genre and eighteenth-century master,
Kitagawa Utamaro
Kitagawa Utamaro ( ja, 喜多川 歌麿; – 31 October 1806) was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his ''bijin ōkubi-e'' "large-headed ...
, in paintings that explored shared erotic preoccupations, such as ''Utamaro Nude, Bumstead Nude'' and ''Utamaro Washing, Bumstead Sleeping'' (both 2003).
Throughout the latter half of his career, Wesley continued to refine his approach, balancing concision and directness with emotional complexity and offbeat subject matter.
[Raynor, Vivien. Review, ''The New York Times'', April 16, 1982.][Pagel, David]
"Wesley’s World: Intimate, Ambiguous,"
''Los Angeles Times'', May 19, 2000. Retrieved September 26, 2022. His work in the 1980s often foregrounded formal concerns through frieze-like arrays of repeated nudes (e.g., ''Hips'', 1984) or animals in decorative, wallpaper-like arrangements (e.g. ''Untitled (Horse and Clouds)'', 1988).
A series in the 1990s employed nude women—often radically cropped with their faces out of view or eyes closed—variously cooing down at viewers (as if seen from a suckling infant's perspective), floating as enveloping, oceanic bodies, or lying prone and vulnerable in the throes of ecstasy.
[McGonigle, Thomas. "John Wesley," ''ARTnews'', September 1991, p. 136–8.] Jenifer Borum described these later paintings as conflating "the maternal and the erotic, effectively underscoring the infantile nature of the media’s obsessional fragmentation and objectification of women." Unlike the ads, she noted, "For Wesley, the personal and the social are inseparable."
David Pagel identified a new level of tenderness and vulnerability in Wesley's large acrylics of the 2000s. Dominated by expanses of flesh against blue sky, works such as ''Smooch'' (2003) depicted men and women in tight close-ups of heads, necks, shoulders and hands and seemed to suggest intense moments, memories or daydreams of intimacy.
[Pagel, David]
''The Los Angeles Times'', September 24, 2004. Retrieved September 26, 2022.
Personal life and death
Wesley married his first wife, Alice Richter, in 1947. They had two children, a daughter, Christine Knox, and a son, Ner Wesley.
After their divorce, he married the minimalist painter Jo Baer in 1959 and moved with her from Los Angeles to New York.
In 1970, they divorced and in 1971 he married the novelist
Hannah Green,remaining with her until her death in 1996. The playwright and painter
Patricia Broderick
Patricia Biow Broderick (February 23, 1925 – November 18, 2003) was an American playwright and painter. She was the wife of actor James Broderick and the mother of actor Matthew Broderick.
Early life and career
Broderick was born Patricia ...
, who died in 2003, was his partner for the last six years of her life.
Wesley died at his home in Manhattan, on February 10, 2022, at the age of 93.
Public collections and recognition
Wesley's work belongs to numerous permanent collections, including those of the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery]
John Wesley
Persons. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Blanton Museum of Art
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (often referred to as the Blanton or the BMA) at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent coll ...
,
[Blanton Museum of Art]
''Annunciations''
Objects. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Chinati Foundation,
Denver Art Museum,
Detroit Institute of Arts,
[Detroit Institute of Arts]
''Maiden, 1965, John Wesley
Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...
,
[Fogg Art Museum]
John Wesley
Collections. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Hirshhorn Museum,
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is an art museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The Brooks Museum, which was founded in 1916, is the oldest and largest art museum in the state of Tennessee. The museum is a privately funded nonprofit institution located in ...
,
[Memphis Brooks Museum of Art]
John Wesley
People. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Museum Ludwig
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It holds many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lich ...
(Germany), Museum of Modern Art,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it one of the oldest art museums on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the US. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum becam ...
,
[Portland Art Museum]
John Wesley
Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Rose Art Museum,
[Rose Art Museum]
''Dream of Unicorns''
Objects. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Seattle Art Museum,
[Seattle Art Museum]
John Wesley
People. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam),
Whitney Museum,
and
Wadsworth Atheneum.
He was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and awards from the
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
and
American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.
[MacDowell]
John Wesley
Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
References
Further reading
*
Heiss, Alanna (2000). ''John Wesley: Paintings 1961–2000'' (1st ed.). New York: Distributed Art Publishers. .
External links
Wesley's page at Fredericks and FreiserLinda Norden on John Wesley's Umami Chinati Foundation, 2019
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wesley, John
1928 births
2022 deaths
20th-century American painters
21st-century American painters
American male painters
American painters
American pop artists
American printmakers
Artists from Los Angeles
Painters from New York City
Minimalist artists
20th-century American male artists