John Wesley

(b Los Angeles, CA, 25 Nov 1928).

American painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He took up painting as a self-taught artist in 1953, the same year in which he began working as an illustrator in the Production Engineering Department of Northrop Aircraft in Los Angeles. In 1960, two years after leaving that job and one year after marrying the American painter Jo Baer (b 1929), he settled in New York, where he became associated with the nascent Pop art movement. The Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who favourably reviewed his first one-man show at the Robert Elkon Gallery, New York, in 1963, was to become a lifelong supporter; although it might seem curious that an artist whose work was as severe as Judd's would appreciate the often lighthearted figurative work of Wesley, with its linear comic-book style and pastel colours, Judd clearly appreciated the clarity of form, subtlety, precision of placement and economy of means that defined Wesley's art from the beginning. Turkeys (1965; see 1993 exh. cat., p. 48, no. 3) is typical in its association of a nearly nude female with the repeated motif of an animal arranged in frieze-like fashion against a flat coloured ground. Although Wesley played on the connotations of colouring-book style through his encasing of flat and brightly coloured forms in a firm black outline, and felt sufficiently at ease about the cartoon and comic-book aspects of his invented imagery to begin making reference to well-known characters from the animated cartoon Popeye in paintings such as Olive Oyl (1973; see 1993 exh. cat., p. 57, no. 13), there was nothing coarse or low-brow about Wesley's brand of Pop. His elegant and often sinuous line had at least as much in common with the pen-and-ink drawings of Aubrey Beardsley as with the graphic style of Walt Disney, and his subject-matter related more to the world of dreams and the imagination than to the consumer society or the brash realities of modern urban life.

Long neglected as one of the minor players in Pop art, Wesley began to gain greater recognition again in the 1990s, a particularly productive period initiated by touching paintings of married life and vulnerability such as Blondie and Dagwood (1990; see 1993 exh. cat., p. 72, no. 29), one of a series based on another celebrated comic strip. In later paintings such as Bite (1992; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.), which consists almost exclusively of an unbroken flesh-coloured surface denoting the flawless skin of an androgynous protagonist being nuzzled by another person with equally sensual lips, he created a refined, graceful and languorous eroticism defined in large part by the use of extreme cinematic close-ups. (Source: MARCO LIVINGSTONE, "John Wesley," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed June 16, 2004) )