Pictorial Strategies Are Focus of John Wesley's Painting in Sert Gallery Exhibition

Recent Retrospective and Popularity among Young Artists Bring New Attention to Maverick American Painter

Cambridge, MA (January 26, 2000)--In John Wesley: Love's Lust, the Harvard University Art Museums will present approximately 50 paintings, gouaches, collages, preparatory drawings, and tracings, many of which have never been exhibited publicly.

Wesley has been painting acutely sexual, intensely observed, narrative paintings for more than 40 years. The conspicuous characteristics of his work since the early seventies--its insistent flatness, powdered pastel palette, cartoon/cinematographic narratives, embrace of the sexually charged encounter, sophisticated anthropomorphism, and mannered drawing--have enormous appeal for younger painters inspired by a digital revolution to rethink the medium: Wesley's painting looks like nothing else out there.

A recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art's P.S.1, Wesley's first in the United States, reflects this new interest in a painter who first came into prominence in the early sixties. Staged against the backdrop of the more extensive MoMA/P.S.1 retrospective, John Wesley: Love's Lust is selective rather than comprehensive, featuring work from the sixties through to the present in an effort to look more closely at Wesley's allegorical subject matter and sophisticated formal innovations.

Organized by Linda Norden, the Barbara Lee associate curator of contemporary art, Fogg Art Museum, the exhibition will open on January 20 and remain on view through February 25, 2001, in the Sert Gallery at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A reception for the exhibition will be held in the gallery on February 15, following a lecture by author and English professor Wayne Koestenbaum, in the Carpenter Center auditorium. (The lecture begins at 6 p.m.)

"Wesley's compelling approach to painting encourages the viewer to question the reasons for his eccentric creations and in doing so forces us all to ponder his intended message," said James Cuno, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums.

"Wesley has never lacked for attention," said Norden, the curator. "But critics have been eager to characterize rather than analyze the art for fear that looking too closely would kill off whatever it is that works. This exhibition is meant to show that exactly the opposite is true. Wesley's paintings can be frighteningly funny, poignant, and just plain weird; but there is a complex pictorial intelligence driving this body of work."

John Wesley: Love's Lust has been organized in two parts. The front room of the Sert Gallery features paintings and gouaches, dating primarily from the seventies, when Wesley first began to explore the formal potential and implied narrative of film and comic-strip composition. A simple device such as the isolation of two confronted figures, for example, shows up in Wesley's 1973 Popeye, his 1976 Missouri Compromise, and his just-finished Blue Blanket. In each, the figures loom large, and background detail has been all but eliminated. Each painting uses a popular hero or figural type to convey a highly charged, topical subject: Popeye shooting a blindfolded Wimpy recalls an all-too-familiar wirephoto image of a general shooting a young boy on a Vietnam street; two figures that look for all the world to be Duke Ellington collaring his anxious manager are dressed in 19th-century clothing and captioned "Missouri Compromise"; a nude male Sumo wrestler awkwardly embraces a blanketed female who turns her baffled gaze, Olympia-style, toward us. Even as he covers diverse social issues, Wesley, like a cartoonist, conveys an astonishing emotional range with great economy of line and by altering little more than his cast of characters.

The back room of the gallery evokes both studio and archive. It includes a wide selection of acrylic-on-paper paintings, which Wesley usually enlarges on canvas. Two wall cases contain some of the traced drawings he uses to compose his paintings. Surprisingly, these tracings reveal how little is fixed by an apparently mechanical means of reproduction: Instead, what becomes quickly apparent is Wesley's mastery of subtle shifts in scale and placement.

Over the last ten years, Wesley has taken another turn in his paintings, opening spaces between figures, substituting distance for repetition, and conveying character less through facial expression than by developing a complex mannered line. This seems to be John Wesley's moment: John Wesley: Love's Lust offers an overdue opportunity to examine the work of an artist who has long been loved, but never taken quite seriously enough.

Lecture
Wayne Koestenbaum: Obscene Allegories in Praise of the Paintings of John Wesley
Thursday, February 15, 6 p.m.
Carpenter Center Auditorium

Wayne Koestenbaum, author and professor of English, City University of New York, Graduate Center, will lecture on John Wesley's paintings as part of the visiting artists lecture series, sponsored by Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Reception in the Sert Gallery and Cafe to follow.

Gallery Talks
John Wesley: Love's Lust, Sert Gallery
Saturday, January 20, 2 p.m.
Saturday, February 17, 2 p.m.
Linda Norden, Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Video Wall, Sert Gallery
In conjunction with the exhibition, John Wesley: Love's Lust, Linda Norden, curator of the exhibition, and Bruce Jenkins, director of the Harvard Film Archive, have programmed the Sert Gallery Video Wall. Videos featured during the run of the Wesley exhibition include Broken English by Derek Jarman, Mouth-to-Mouth by the Glasgow-based artists Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart, Dara Birnbaum’s Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, Dance 1-6 by Raphael Ortiz, and a kiss or two from Andy Warhol’s Kiss.

The Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums is one of the world's leading arts institutions. It is distinguished by the range and depth of its collections, its groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of its staff. For more than a century, it has been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and is renowned for its seminal and ongoing role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

The three art museums at Harvard - the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum - are all outstanding institutions in their respective fields. The Fogg also houses the Straus Center for Conservation, long a leader in the research and development of scientific and technology-based analysis of art, as well as the U. S. headquarters for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an ongoing excavation project in western Turkey. The 150,000 objects in the art museums' collections range in date from ancient times to the present and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its areas of focus.

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