Courtesy of the Smart Museum

Sounds of South African resistance—songs, chants, and speeches—resonate from corner to corner of the Smart Museum, before an exhibition of striking images opens before the viewer. The exhibition, “Vision and Communism,” is a part of the Soviet Arts Experience, a citywide retrospective marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the USSR and explores the work of Soviet propaganda artist Viktor Koretsky. Koretsky’s innovative, confrontational style is grounded in experimental techniques and emotionally charged imagery. Its bold assertion of a universal vision for mankind—a world free from racism and capitalist oppression—marks a departure from the patriotic classicism characterized by the Socialist Realist art of Koretsky’s contemporaries.

His posters, photographs, and sketches are riveting, thrumming with visceral necessity that invite the audience to share in the suffering of the oppressed working class. A black and white photograph, titled “If this is the land of the free, then what do you call a prison?” shows the Statue of Liberty atop a pedestal made of a distorted American flag. Rather than stars in the corner, there is a dollar sign; rather than stripes, the bars of a prison hold back an interracial mass of workers. In Koretsky’s work, capitalism is shown to be “an alternative cosmos, characterized by degradation, warmongering, and indifference,” according to the exhibit brochure. Christopher Heuer of the Princeton University Art Department says that the art “sought to unite viewers with an immediate, ongoing, global struggle.”

In addition to imagery representing the evils of capitalism, Koretsky’s work also offers a picture of racial cooperation—a  joint struggle against the forces of the free market and of the West. One poster shows a black man breaking free from chains. The text emblazoned across the image reads, “Africa fights! Africa will win!” Another poster depicts a pair of sunglasses. Reflected in one lens is an image of a black man suffering from an attack of police brutality, and in the other a group of white soldiers killing an Asian man. Its title is appropriately acerbic: “American Policy (Internal/External).”

Walking farther into the exhibition, the viewer becomes progressively more engaged with the work, with its hallucinatory and horrific images. The posters make manifest the pain and suffering of their subjects, which become increasingly intimate for the viewer. Koretsky pulls the viewer out of his or her world to identify with a larger picture of suffering. According to the curators, the “situations and emotions that populate the exhibition feel as if they are intensely ‘ours,’ while their accompanying indictments and solutions remain absolutely alien.” He draws a picture of private pain, to help one mass of people identify with another.

Koretsky’s art has an element of didacticism, equating capitalism with slavery and Communism with liberty. The spectacular glitz and glam of American culture permeated the world, even crossing the Iron Curtain into the Soviet Union. The sex and death imagery that dominated Western pop culture during the Cold War had an alluring shock value. Koretsky aimed to channel this compelling visuality without enticing the viewer to it.

When Koretsky was working, large banners representing humming industry and agricultural advancements were typical for Soviet art, but his posters and photographs explore the unfamiliar. They do not focus on current events: rather, they depict pervasive conditions of suffering and an imminent (yet invisible) future in which Communism has triumphed.

Koretsky’s art is, the curators say in their booklet, a kind of “advertising for a future that didn’t come.” In providing an alternative to the brazen, sexy advertisements of capitalism, Koretsky offered a world of shared sacrifice and cooperation. “Vision and Communism” brings the contemporary Western viewer into an alien world as well, one in which capitalism is a vicious engine, a world in which the aims of art are entirely new. You identify with the hyperbolic imagery that evokes sex and death, and you are confronted with something that is both familiar and foreign. This exhibition compels you to reflect, to examine your national and ideological roots; Koretsky’s powerful vision begs the question.

Smart Museum, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through January 22. Tuesday, Wednesday, & Friday, 10am-4pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. Free. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

Courtesy Smart Museum of Art

A headless god of stone sits with his legs crossed, a red and blue halo encircling the empty space above his neck. A stripe of faded green is still visible on his robes. His left hand is bent backwards, the palm facing out; the right hand is gone, but one imagines that it too would have faced outwards, a calm gesture of acceptance. In front of the halo, a regal, dignified, and electric-yellow head appears. Other yellow heads and bodies pop up around the altar, some crowned, some bald; some bowing, some playing instruments. The heads appear on the six elegant attendants that flank the deity or on the thousands of figures carved into the stone wall. All around the temple, fragments return to their original positions.

The altar is in China, but the yellow heads appear in Hyde Park. Three screens, ten-by-nine feet tall, show a 3D rendering of a cave-temple in the limestone hills of Hebei province, 250 miles southwest of Beijing—11,000 miles west of Chicago. This digital reconstruction of the cave is in the center of a new exhibit at the Smart Museum, “Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan,” which was produced in conjunction with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian. The exhibit is as much about the future as it is the past, combining ancient sculptures and remnants from the caves with high-tech digital recreations.

Xiangtangshan, or the Mountain of Echoing Halls, consists of two groups of caves that were transformed into Buddhist temples by the wealthy imperial patrons of the sixth-century Northern Qi Dynasty. The caves were relatively well maintained until the early 20th century. Interest in East Asian art spiked during a period of political unrest in China, making it all too easy for art dealers to take their pick of the caves’ artifacts and sell them abroad. Incense-burning pilgrims and camera-toting tourists still visit the temples to this day for worship and religious festivals, but most of the remaining statuaries lack heads or hands.

In recent decades, interest in the cave-temples of Xiangtangshan has resurged; in 2004, Dr. Kathy Tsiang and her team at the Center for the Art of East Asia traveled to see the fragments of Xiangtangshan scattered in museums and private collections across the world. Using sophisticated equipment to scan the statues and fragments, scholars then created 3D images, like the Digital Cave, which helped match a fragment to its original location. In the digital cave at the Smart Museum, the stone that remains on site is shown in its natural color, while heads and fragments that have been located outside China are digitally restored to their original bodies, appearing in bright yellow.

Also in the exhibit are thirteen original limestone fragments from Xiangtangshan. Lent from museums as far away as San Francisco and London, the collection includes a crouching demon, a disciple of the Buddha, and a tall bodhisattva, the Buddhist embodiment of compassion. A short, looping documentary shows modern Xiangtangshan; the green, tranquil hills of Drum Mountain are juxtaposed against the nearby mining town of Fengfeng, where factory smoke circles gray apartment buildings and hordes of cars and people crowd the streets.

The exhibit inevitably evokes questions about art, national ownership, and the idea of what is sacred, but it also changes the terms of each of those debates. At a symposium given on October 23, historians and curators came together to discuss the significance of the caves from artistic, historical, and archaeological perspectives, as well as the implications of using 3D scanning technology. “One can recover the architectural value [of the caves] with 21st-century technology,” said museum curator Richard Born, “without the need to return the object to its original location.”

More than ever before, with new technology, the art can belong both to China and to the world. As the art dealer C.T. Loo said many decades ago, when he lamented the nature of his work in dismantling the caves: “I felt so ashamed….China has lost its treasures. Our only consolation is that art has no frontiers…[the statues are] ambassadors from China.”

5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through January 16. Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-4pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday, 10am-4pm; Saturday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

The three nights of performances will focus on specific pieces by composers Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. The compositions will be framed by commentary from musicians, and from the Spanish novelist and art historian Antonio Muñoz Molina. The festival is organized by University of Chicago Presents and produced by the two founders of the Washington, D.C.-based Post-Classical Ensemble, American writer and music historian Joe Horowitz, and Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Their combined thematic and interdisciplinary approach is critical for the festival’s broader significance. “Through this music we are also examining what happened to Spain in the twentieth century,” says Gil-Ordóñez.

Under the dictator Francisco Franco, Spanish culture was administered by the state. Popular composers, including Joaquín Rodrigo, whose “Concierto de Aranjuez” is probably the most famous Spanish melody, were declared “official” composers of the fascist government. The music they produced stands accused of presenting a shallow, cosmetic image of Spanish tradition, with a simplified flamenco at its core. The musicians involved with the festival have a deep respect for flamenco tradition, but Horowitz explains that, “as popularized, it has become another one of those Spanish postcards. It can marginalize Spanish culture more than celebrate it.” The festival organizers hope that deep, directed listening will challenge this image of a picturesque and backwards Spain, which Muñoz Molina has summarized as “bullfighters, poverty, flies, and passion.”

Thursday night’s performance of Manuel de Falla’s “Concerto for Keyboard” is a centerpiece of the festival. In three short movements of a few minutes each, Falla condensed centuries of Spanish musical tradition; the first movement interprets the songs of the Spanish Renaissance, the second draws on sixteenth-century church music, and the third references the later keyboard school. The Chicago Chamber Musicians, with Gil-Ordóñez conducting, will play the concerto twice: once near the beginning of the evening, and again at the end. The material in between, including poetry from St. John of the Cross and choral music by the University’s Motet Choir, comes from the musical traditions that the Concerto references; the accompanying commentary will illuminate these connections. Muñoz Molina describes the effect of this educational listening: “The second time the concerto is played you have the physical experience of feeling your ears open.”

On Friday night, renowned Spanish pianist Pedro Carboné will play “Iberia,” a series of twelve pieces by composer Isaac Albéniz. Each piece evokes a different setting from Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century, from Granada’s gypsy quarter to a working-class neighborhood in Madrid. The “Iberia” is well-known in orchestral arrangements, but these abridged versions simplify the chromatically dense pieces to what Horowitz again calls “a selection of slick tourist postcards.” Carboné will play the epic “Iberia” as it was originally intended, on a single keyboard. Carboné and Molina will discuss how the piece prefigures the forms and techniques of modernism. On Saturday night, Ortiz will conduct Carboné and the University’s student orchestra in a program of orchestral music. In conjunction with the festival, an exhibit at the Smart Museum features drawings and sculptures by Julio González, and the classical music radio station WFMT (98.7 FM) will play twenty hours of Spanish music this week.

The festival coincides with Spain’s presidency of the European Union, and is co-produced by the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones of the Spanish government and sponsored by both the Instituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of Spain in Chicago. “Beyond Flamenco” has yet to play for a Spanish audience, but the practice of redefining the parameters of national identity through a deep and collective listening of musical history has powerful significance for any audience. As Gil-Ordóñez suggests, “This music could be part of a future as well.”
Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. March 4-6. Thursday-Friday, 7:30pm; Saturday, 8pm. (773)702-8068. $20/$5 students. chicagopresents.uchicago.edu

“The ‘darker side’,” explained Anne Leonard, the Chicago curator of the exhibit, at its opening last Thursday afternoon, “means a kind of different look at this period of art history that we often associate with Impressionism: outdoors, people lolling on the grass having picnics.” Peter Parshall, the curator of Old Master prints at the National Gallery of Art and organizer of the show (as well as a UofC alum), was slated to give a lecture during the opening’s food and drink reception, but snow and bad weather prevented his arrival. Leonard, then, led a tour of the gallery on her own.

Primarily composed of prints—etchings, lithographs, drypoints—from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, “The Darker Side of Light” does indeed portray subject matters not often addressed in more popular works from the time period. The curators framed the exhibition around seven categories—Nature, Creatures, City, Obsession, Reverie, Abjection, and Violence & Death—and grouped them accordingly on the gallery walls. Leonard led the tour through the gallery, each theme darker than the last, the group of curious students gradually growing quieter. As she shared background on the exhibit and the individual works, stories of death, vice, and loneliness sent her listeners into solemn contemplation of the dark images around them. Leonard explained, “There’s something about this medium [of printmaking] that encouraged people to explore new subject matters, taboo topics, the ills of society.”

The second half of the exhibition’s title, “Arts of Privacy,” proposes a possible explanation as to why. Most of the works included in the show were originally intended for ownership by private collectors, an audience that was more appreciative of touchy subjects and more generous with artistic license. Printmaking is particularly well-suited to these conditions. As prints get larger, it becomes harder for an artist to make an even impression from a plate, so smaller pieces are preferred. The texture and nuance lent to works by techniques such as etching and drypoint are better appreciated up close, meant to be enjoyed in dim light so as to preserve the integrity of light-sensitive papers. “Most of this art is intended to be viewed in domestic environments,” said Leonard. “It’s kept in desk drawers, folios, tucked away in cabinets. This is the kind of thing that would be in peoples’ libraries. It’s not wallpaper—you have to take it out, like a book off of the shelf.”

The works in the exhibit are not famous museum pieces, but neither are their creators obscure artists. Works signed by Kollwitz, Munch, and Toulouse-Lautrec are not so surprising, as their more popular works often deal with the seedier side of life—but artists such as Degas, Cassatt, and Corot, whose names have become synonymous with the lighter, airier, style of Impressionism, also make appearances. Regardless of his or her reputation, each artist displays a deep and sometimes unexpected understanding of the art of printmaking, both its technical capacity for shade and shadow, and the unique qualities that made it so well suited to the intimate, difficult subject matter of their time. “The artists try to manage the difference between light and dark,” Leonard said with a tight smile, aware of the pun she was making, “but they use more dark than light.”
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through June 13. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 10am-4pm; Thursday 10am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

With its myriad styles of architecture, the city was attractive to artists who were inspired both by the ruins of classical antiquity and by baroque culture. Rome also presented them with a lucrative commercial opportunity via the influx of wealthy, souvenir-seeking tourists.
Mementos from the Tour held prestige back home, and those who could not afford to cart off ancient statues contented themselves with prints and paintings of city views, or vedute. One of the most prominent practitioners of vedutismo active in Rome at this time was Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Trained as an architect, Piranesi studied etching under Giuseppe Vasi (whose work is also on display in this exhibit). He gained widespread acclaim for his prints of both the ancient and modern buildings and monuments of Rome. In one such print on view at the Smart Museum, an etching of the “Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli” (1761), Piranesi’s background in masonry is clearly visible in his painstakingly detailed rendering of the columns and stonework of the building. His temple is depicted in an almost theatrical manner, with gnarled trees clinging to the ruins and wispy, miniscule figures looking up in awe, accentuating the buildings’ grandeur. In contrast, another painting by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (“View of Tivoli: The Temple of the Sibyl”) features the same temple but in a remarkably different manner. Lallemand renders the scene with a much greater emphasis on its pastoral aspects, with the temple occupying a much smaller area of the painting in the background. In this way the exhibit highlights the fact that although these artists were working with the same subject matter, at roughly the same time, the work they produced was tremendously diverse and reflected a variety of aesthetic preferences.

Also on display at “Sites to Behold” are several works by the English print sellers Charles Knapton and Arthur Pond. Their series of “Prints in Imitation of Drawings” replicated the Old Masters, and they contributed greatly to the formation of English artistic tastes during this period. Because these prints made particular works of art more widely known, they served to substantially elevate the status of the original paintings and their subject matter. The prints by Pond and Knapton were also desirable because they were original works in themselves. It was not until the nineteenth century that reproductive engravings lost esteem as an art form.

“Sites to Behold” is interesting in that it addresses a variety of cultural aspects of eighteenth century Rome. It showcases the assortment of artistic styles and aesthetics that thrived in that unique setting. Many of the artists featured in this exhibit were extremely influential and would be an inspiration to later movements, including Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Additionally, their work served to cement Rome’s significance as a serious artistic and cultural center.
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through January 17. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 10am-4pm; Thursday 10am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

The man’s name is Travis, and he is a visual artist, musician, Vietnam veteran, and resident of the Jeffery Manor neighborhood. He offers us chicken gumbo, collard greens, and cornbread. Then he tells us about the young people who moved into the neighborhood after the Robert Taylor Homes closed and about the old women who keep them in line.

This is the last stop on the Heartland South Study Day, a tour of the far South Side presented last Saturday by AREA Chicago and the Smart Museum of Art. “The exhibit started from road trips,” said Stephanie Smith, co-curator of the museum’s newest exhibit, “Heartland.” So we got on the road ourselves.

We traveled to South Chicago and discussed plans for redeveloping the expansive, fenced-off former U.S. Steel site along the lakefront. At Rainbow Beach, we remembered the clash between white and black swimmers that caused the 1961 wade-in there. We stopped at a concrete wall with a faded mural that used to be the picket fence border of the mill that made the steel for the area’s railroads, the U.S. Army, and the Sears and Hancock Towers. Our guide told us of the immigrant worker communities that once sprang up around each gate in the fence, each with its own character. These were the oldest, dirtiest, and least desirable neighborhoods in the city.

Everywhere there were markers of change, past and future. One bridge near Pullman reads, “Training the community on tourism.” We hear about a man who has started keeping bees on the old U.S. Steel land, while the surrounding community waits to hear new development proposals that may take twenty to forty years to execute. At an exhibit on the Great Migration at the formerly whites-only Hotel Florence in Pullman, the curator says she imagines saying to George Pullman, “You never thought I would be able to come in the front door, did you?”

A stated goal of the project is to demonstrate how artists work in and respond to their surroundings, and artists are grouped by region to help the viewer tease out some spirit of the place through the artists’ treatment of common themes and subjects. Whoop Dee Doo, a Kansas City sibling of Chic-A-Go-Go, stages live performances of a faux children’s television show; the group’s twenty or so members make art independently and with other groups, including their gallery neighbor Cody Critcheloe and his glam-rock band SSION. To be honest, it’s not clear what part of Kansas City is reflected here. Perhaps it is a place artists wish to escape from, whether through make-believe or in Carnal Torpor’s “Calm Dome,” a padded, cradling sphere that hums softly to the visitor resting inside.

The connections between Detroit artists and their city are portrayed more clearly, helped by the relative transparency of their media. Scott Hocking’s dreamy photographs of abandoned interiors make a beautiful thing out of urban decay, particularly in “Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21,” for which the artist built a pyramid out of the floor’s concrete blocks in a wall-less, stalactite-filled auto factory. Design 99’s “Heartland Machine” transformed a broken boat into a thing with wings, outfitting a small motorboat on a trailer with multicolored scrap-metal wings and taking it on a road trip across the Midwest.

Detroit presents the most interesting challenge to the stereotypical idea of the Heartland: the foreign artist working in America. Marjetica Potrč, a Slovenian architect, designed a wind turbine and solar panel system for the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for teenage mothers that runs a student-staffed farm in urban Detroit. Potrč has made an international career working extensively with nonprofit and charitable agencies, and her work exemplifies the kind of cooperation which offers hope for revitalization in economically-depressed cities like Detroit. Her inclusion, along with that of German video artist Julika Rudelius, reflects the international character of the exhibit itself: originally presented in The Netherlands during the 2008 presidential campaign, “Heartland” was meant to introduce Europeans to a facet of America everyone thought they knew but didn’t. Charles Esche, co-curator and director of the Van Abbemuseum, said that when he came to the United States to research the project, his expectations mirrored those of the students; he especially hadn’t understood the role of religion in middle America, and how religion can penetrate secular life when a town’s only meeting place is the church. This issue isn’t explicitly dealt with in the exhibition, but at some distance from the artistic subjects, an objectivity conferred by unfamiliarity remains.

After the Hyde Park Art Center’s series of discussions on the Chicago art scene last year, it’s surprising that Heartland deals so little with Chicago artists. Kerry James Marshall, Alabama-born but now living in Chicago, is a notable exception; he is also one of the few black artists represented. His “Dailies,” comic strip-like panels of street life, are visually arresting, but suffer from a lack of curatorial notes and context. Chicago, unlike Kansas City and Detroit, doesn’t merit a gallery room to itself; instead Marshall is placed in a group called the Radical Center alongside scattered artists of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. Perhaps it’s time that the rest of the region receives attention, but Chicago’s diverse artists are still too often forgotten.
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through January 17. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 10am-4pm, Thursday 10am-8pm, Saturday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

Self Portrait by Berenice Abbott; courtesy of the Smart Museum

The first work presented is a set of negatives from an 1860s photo shoot, which closely resemble the shots from mall instant photo booths. It’s fitting, since the 19th-century negatives were taken for a similar purpose: specifically for calling cards, with the distributor asserting his or her social status by choice of pose or props. However, the small size of the show means each work functions as a signifier for a broader trend. Fully embodying Oliver Wendell Holmes’s epigrammatic description of photography as a “mirror with a memory,” these early images are mostly portraits. Nevertheless, the oldest samples in the show, including an early sitting room portrait by the 19th-century French cartoonist, photographer, and technophile Nadar and another by the pioneering female photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, are perhaps the most intriguing works in the exhibit. Rarely seen in public, the directness of these shots’ representation imbues them with a kind of historical meaning that art for art’s sake can never create.

However, the whole show soon jumps from 19th-century mimicry to 20th-century avant-garde: Tristan Tzara sitting among subtly inserted Dadaist symbols as captured by Man Ray, and Felix Man’s starkly monumental portrait of the German printmaker Max Lieber stand out, among other works. The highlights of the show, however, are works by lesser-known artists. August Sander’s “Triple Self-Portrait” and Berenice Abbott’s “Self-Portrait” get at the soul of the subject and their environment. In the former, overlapping images of Sander’s head let us glimpse his creative confusion. In addition to establishing character, the artists in the exhibit are able to convey emotion. “Women with Hydrangea” creates a raw and horrific image of grief.

Ultimately, “Malleable Likeness and the Photographic Portrait” makes a point about stylistic progression as a marker of the medium’s transformation. Some of the more traditional 19th-century portraits stick out as illustrating a rather different point than the more consciously artistic shots that makes up the exhibit. It does mark the transition between simple portraiture and creative variations on the reproduction of nature, but the analogy does not fit like a glove, due to the aesthetic gap between 19th-century and artistic works.

Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through August 30. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 10am-4pm, Thursday, 10am-8pm, weekends 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. Free. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

The question weighing on everyone’s mind was how these significant principles translated (or didn’t) in emails and text messages. While Adams’ presentation was not a formal comparison between the status of letters of the past with the rise of technology, she acknowledged the concern. Adams believes that the foremost distinction “between texting or email and letter writing” pertains to objecthood. At the heart of this concern is the threat that the content of our message is influenced by the form we use to convey it—in this case, as an object or “virtual.” Thus the nature of the workshop was partially sentimental—the listener was necessarily nostalgic for this bygone skill, and worried about the possibility that today’s replacement suffers considerably in quality.

The sobering message was followed by a letter writer’s fantasy buffet of materials to craft elaborate letters themselves. A long table packed with papers, stamps, markers, pencils, calligraphy tools, glues, and glitters beckoned attendees to resurrect this “lost art.”

"Study for the Connecticut Ballroom: Dance of Death" by H.C. Westerman; courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art

Walking through the H. C. Westermann exhibit now showing at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art means embracing a certain degree of sensory overload. Its title “Your Pal, Cliff,” references the artist’s prolific letter writing, and the exhibit features an enormous collection of his personal and professional correspondence along with sculptures, prints, drawings, sketchbooks, tools, and printing blocks. The extensive presentation of Westermann’s artwork and paraphernalia gives the exhibit a circus atmosphere, which makes for a frenetic viewing experience. To their credit, the curators structure the exhibit around persistent motifs in his work. Despite this, and Westermann’s bawdy, morbid humor, it’s a challenging exhibit.
Horace Clifford Westermann—known to friends, family and the art world as Cliff—was born in Los Angeles in 1922. Between two wartime stints in the Marines he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1954 with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Though his desire to be an artist began in childhood, it was his military experiences that most informed his work. One such military-influenced motif highlighted in the exhibit is the “Death Ship,” a hulking, deserted vessel that alternately lurks in the background or acts as the focus of a piece. Inspired by a childhood fascination with ships and wartime memories aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the Death Ship is prominent in Westermann’s work. Realized in a variety of forms, it can be seen as a sculpture or carved into other sculptures, traced onto letters, and as the subject of large woodcuts. One print (“Untitled #16,” 1968) from a series of eighteen lithographs titled “See America First” depicts the Death Ship immobilized in a pack of ice. This desolate scene recalling Caspar Friedrich’s “The Sea of Ice” is labeled with the slogan “See America First,” a phrase originally conceived to promote tourism in the western United States.
Sweet, playful words (like those found in love notes to his wife Joanna, another prominent theme in the exhibit) often accompany violent or menacing imagery. Westermann often crafted pieces whose constituent parts juxtapose one another. This is the case in “The Connecticut Ballroom: Dance of Death,” a carefully but playfully carved woodcut from a series made in 1975-76. In it, two ghastly figures dance on a dock, oblivious to the Death Ship in the distance. One, a man with slicked-back hair and dressed in an old-fashioned tuxedo, represents Westermann’s alter ego.
The exhibit was conceived, in the words of co-curator Michael Tymkiw, as a “celebration” of a generous gift from the estate of Westermann’s widow. This gift, along with other donations, established the Smart Museum’s permanent H. C. Westermann Study Collection. While the collection is obviously a tremendous asset to the museum, the exhibit feels at times a bit bloated—as though the goal was to display as many pieces from the collection as possible, whatever the cost to clarity. The sketches, fan letters, and related works (including a few by his wife Joanna) succeed at illuminating his psyche and provide additional context in which to view his own works. Though their quantity at times obscures, Westermann’s meticulous craftsmanship and unconventional artistic vision manages to shine through.

Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through September 6. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 10am-4pm, Thursday, 10am-8pm, weekends 11am-5pm. (773)702-0200. Free. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu