H. C. Westermann

(b Los Angeles, CA, 11 Dec 1922; d Danbury, CT, 3 Nov 1981).

American sculptor. After working in logging camps in the Pacific Northwest, he joined the US Marine Corps in 1942 and served as a gunner for three years. The psychological terror that he experienced during World War II became an underlying theme in his later work, in particular in the Death Ships, for example Death Ship USS Franklin Arising from an Oil Slick Sea (pine, ebony and enamel, 1976; London, Charles and Doris Saatchi priv. col, see 1981 exh. cat., no. 33), as did the war-generated code of honour in which machismo, self-reliance and fitness figured prominently. After touring the Far East as an acrobat with the U.S.O. (United Services Organization), he enrolled in 1947 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1954, after a year in Korea with the Marine Corps, he left the Art Institute and began to make sculpture.

Westermann's sculptures, made of varnished or painted wood and objets trouvés, conjoin Expressionism, the unexpected juxtapositions of Dada and Surrealism, and a craft approach to composition that he had developed while working as a carpenter to support himself, exemplified by Mad House (see fig.) and Antimobile (laminated Douglas fir, plywood and metal, 1966; New York, Whitney). Underlying them is his conviction that individuals are powerless to control the events of their lives or to affect the impending and unpredictable destruction around them. His depiction of the anxiety of living in a threatening world is mitigated by the refinement and beauty of his craftsmanship, and by humour, which he most often elicits through visually paradoxical combinations of contradictory or opposing characteristics and verbal and visual puns. In the Big Change (laminated pine plywood, 1963; New York, William Copley priv. col., see 1978 exh. cat., p. 23), for example, the materiality of wood is contradicted by the impression that it is a soft, pliable substance; the title of Walnut Box (walnut wood, walnuts and plate glass, 1964; Chicago, Mr and Mrs E. A. Bergman priv. col., see 1978 exh. cat., p. 19) refers both to the type of wood from which it is made and to the real walnuts with which it is filled. In 1961 Westermann moved to Brookfield Center, CT, and settled with the painter Joanna Beall (b 1935), whom he had married in 1959, in the caretaker's cottage attached to her family home. During the 1960s Westermann's predilection for punning, autobiographical themes and use of discredited, vernacular materials exerted a strong influence on artists in Chicago and San Francisco who responded to his non-formalist attitude towards art. (Source: BARBARA HASKELL, "H.C. Westermann," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed June 16, 2004) )