Admission: I have no idea what Wesley’s paintings are about. Here’s what they’re about.
John Wesley was first and foremost a pervert, and an exceedingly anxious pervert at that.
In 2013, New York’s Fredericks & Freiser Gallery—who represented Wesley from 1996 until his death—published a catalog accompanying his 2013 exhibition “The Bumsteads”, a show comprised of works spanning thirty-nine years which depicted the original American cartoon nuclear family as disrobed, abject, kinky, suicidal and existentially stultified.
For those too young to be familiar with the Blondie comic strip (centered around the Dagwood family, particularly Blondie and her seemingly hapless, nitwit husband Dagwood Bumstead), imagine Marge and Homer Simpson. The painting on the catalog’s cover, titled simply The Bumsteads (1974), shows Blondie, face down on her bed, nude save a blouse, burying her face in a tissue. On the other side of the bed, hands on the mattress with his face obscured between her spread legs and high heeled shoes, Bumstead stoops fully dressed, about to attempt sexually pleasing his distraught wife, or else recoiling from a rejected attempt at rear-approach cunnilingus.
This is a painting of marriage as real as they come, depicted in just five colors, flatter than flat but as juicy with despair as any painting by Walter Sickert.
Other works in this series:
Off His Feed (1990) shows Bumstead hugging his pillow while Blondie appears to be both tickling his feet and giving him a blowjob. The couple are both fully naked, looking disturbingly both cartoonish and porcine.
Bumstead in Bedlam (1991) is a tall painting showing Bumstead in a straightjacket, his mouth agape in terror.
First Kiss: Blondie Bumstead and Ynes Sanchez (1991) depicts Blondie and her fictional neighbor Ynez, nude, embracing in the shower, about to lock lips.
Bumstead Out the Window (2000) is a painting of the tortured husband apparently leaping to his death, a smile on his face, a twisted update on Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void.
Bumstead and Dead Geisha (2006) depicts Bumstead looking blankly over the shoulder of his apparent sexual companion, a paper-white, dead Geisha.
These images find their origin in what were called “Tijuana Bibles”, dirty comic books produced between the end of the 1920’s and the beginning of the 1940’s. Comic books made in small patches, eight pages long, wherein innocent characters from popular cartoons were thrust into prurient, pornographic scenarios. But the sex in these paintings of the Dagwood family is never tittilating, only troubling, and mostly always frustrated. This is the genius of Wesley’s appropriation of the family; the Dagwoods become proxies for the average American couple. Sex plays a small part in the work, and only in service of the overarching theme; psychological unease. In this way, Wesley turned fan-fiction into high art. The true perversity lies not in the sexual element but in the perverting of the sexual element.
He draws us in with the appearance of some naughty transfiguration only to show us ourselves, rendered flatly, dumbly, in Easter colors, our entertainment media accusing rather than amusing us. At first the familiarity evokes laughter, but soon the uncanniness evokes tears.
No art is more successful than that which can make you both laugh and cry, either at once or in alternation.
Wesley has a connection to Karen Kilimnik, another outlier who resists categorization, and who co-opts figures from culture and history to further her own personal world-making. Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a prince while some supermodel, a suffering Russian princess. Wesley in some ways painted science-fiction, or at the least, speculative fiction. What if, instead of the Dagwood family freezing when we close the newspaper, they continued on with their lives, argued over affection or housework, the reciprocation of orgasms, who was pulling their weight in disciplining the kids?
This is but a fraction of Wesley’s output, and in no way the most discomfiting. Common throughout his paintings are depictions of nude women, nude men and nude children in comminglement, alone, or as often was the case, with animals. In one painting (Rabbits, 1968) a woman lays on her back, giving birth to a rabbit, the seventh in a litter of which six have already assumed a patterned formation. In another painting (Birthday, 1990) a Disney type duck is giving birth to what appears to be a fully formed human leg. In Leda & The Man (1972) a man, naked save braces, chases after the mythological swan. Certainly there are nude women, but there are also nude men, nude bears, nude elephants. Beyond the social order, the very order of nature is shattered. Camels are accosted by horse-human hybrids (Camel, 1966) and kangaroo’s keep dogs as pets (Slave, 1971). Wesley’s work is not about shock however, this would be a mistaken reading. Instead his work is about taboo, and particularly about fetish. He was mistakenly considered a Pop Artist, but really wasn’t, and was mistakenly considered a Minimalist, but really wasn’t that either. John Wesley was uncategorizable, uncharted and unapologetic, and therefore unmistakably American, in the greatest of ways.