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IN THE GALLERIES: JOHN WESLEY
DonaId Judd
If pop art is defined as the apparent duplication of a picture or a pattern popularly used, Wesley's paintings are pop art. Roy Lichtenstein's paintings, by that definition, are the only others consistently pop. Outside of the method of concealing the formal and inventive elements within schematic depictions normally without such things, Wesley's paintings do not resemble Lichtenstein's or anyone's. The number of the paintings, the time necessary to paint them, makes it unlikely that the method was taken from Lichtenstein. Wesley's paintings, if they are pop art, are retroactive pop. Most of the paintings are like or are copies of the pictures and patterns of blue and white china. Most of the forms are nineteenth-century. The forms selected, the shapes to which they are unobtrusively altered, the order used and the small details are humorous and goofy. This becomes a cool, psychological oddness. A blue escutcheon fills Cheep. This blue, which is always the same, is slightly bluer and darker than cerulean. At the top there are two identical birds statant, nearly white silhouettes, each holding a worm like a banner. Their eyes are just double circles. They are the parents of the fifteen smaller birds in the nest or bowl at the bottom. Their eyes are just empty rings, like Orphan Annie's. Together they make a complicated white silhouette inflamed. There are two rows of them, all identical, all with their bills wide open. The heads and the spaces between them make oval vertical shapes, and the touching bills make two horizontal zig-zags. There are blue ovals between the top row of birds; the white of their bodies fills the spaces between the lower birds. Their bodies and the intervening spaces are outlined by the same lines. The vertical shapes are as positive as the shapes of the birds, yet are obviously different spatially. This ambiguity is one of Wesley's main devices. The blank eyes are also an instance. Two of the paintings have colored flowers on vines encircling pictures, one of which is the Radcliffe Tennis Team, obviously not this year's. The five girls are schematized and are in black and white. The outlines are always awkward and funny. The girls have no bones, and their empty, awry racquets and outlined clothing form other blank, unlocatable spaces. All of Wesley's paintings are well done. The only objection is theoretical, not critical. Wesley's method, and Lichtenstein's, is somewhat the same as that of traditional painting; the form is relatively hidden. The guise here is not appearances though, but what some bumpkin made of appearances for some unartistic reason. This is a big difference and is interesting - it is sort of a meta-representation - but (and this unreasonably denies the paintings as they are) the curious quality of Wesley's work would be better unconcealed, unadjusted and unsealed to anything else.
Arts, April 1963: 51
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