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. "An Artist Who Couldn't Be Pinned Down, Dies at 93," 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 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. "Charm, Trauma Mix in Wesley Works," 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. "John Wesley – Don't Eat My Eagle: Paintings From the 1960s," 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. "John Wesley – The Bumsteads," 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 "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, 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,Museum of Modern Art. John Wesley, Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2022. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,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.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 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, 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, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol.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 and Sol LeWitt.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 (1959); Oakland Art Museum (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 (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 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. "Something Funny's Going On," 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, which nodded toward sources including ancient friezes and vase painting, Japanese art, Art Nouveau, Matisse, 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. "," in 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