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Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H. C. Westermann Study Collection

April 2 – September 6, 2009

Horace Clifford (H. C.) Westermann (1922–1981) created a meticulously crafted and highly personal body of work that defies easy categorization.

He blended imagery born of profound personal experiences—especially apparent in the Death Ship and other motifs related to his searing experiences in World War II—with bawdy, absurd, or unsettling elements from contemporary American material culture. This comprehensive and revealing new exhibition offers fresh insight into the work and life of this singular American artist.

Drawing largely on material that has never been exhibited before, Your Pal, Cliff brought to light for the first time the full scope of the H. C. Westermann Study Collection. The collection—established at the Smart Museum through donations by the estate of the artist’s wife, Joanna Beall Westermann, and enhanced by gifts from the artist’s family and others—includes correspondence, sketchbooks, print blocks, gift objects, photographic documentation, tools, and unfinished projects in addition to rich holdings of finished sculptures, drawings, and prints.

Your Pal, Cliff mixed art with objects of a more archival nature in order to detail Westermann’s signature themes, legendary sense of craft, and the convergence of his life and art.

Video

Video: Curators Rachel Furnari and Michael Tymkiw talk about their discoveries in the H. C. Westermann Study Collection.

About the H. C. Westermann Study Collection

The H. C. Westermann Study Collection at the Smart Museum of Art is one of the most significant public collections of artwork and archival material related to Westermann's life and work. The collection was established in 2002 with the first of two major gifts from the estate of Westermann's wife, the artist Joanna Beall Westermann, and has been enhanced over the past decade by donations from the artist's sister, Martha Renner, and other individuals closely associated—either personally or professionally—with the artist, as well as several prominent collectors of Westermann's work. The collection continues to grow in both breadth and depth.

All together, the study collection includes nearly fifty sculptures and objects (both large gallery pieces and smaller, more personal objects given as gifts to Westermann's wife and others), many drawings and letter-drawings by the artist, all but two of the artist's known prints, forty-five printing blocks, seventeen sketchbooks (dating from between 1952 and 1981), as well as an extraordinary mix of personal and professional correspondence (numbering over one thousand items), records, photographs, books and magazines, art making tools, unfinished sculptures, and other objects related to Westermann's life and art.

The study collection has a dedicated home in the Smart Museum's contemporary galleries, where a rotating selection of Westermann material is permanently on view. The unique richness of the collection makes it a vital resource for students, scholars, and the public alike.

Credits

Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H. C. Westermann Study Collection is organized by the Smart Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Rachel Furnari and Michael Tymkiw, both PhD candidates in art history at the University of Chicago and Smart Museum curatorial interns, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.

This exhibition and related programs have been made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

Top: Installation view of Your Pal, Cliff with Burning House (1958) in the foreground. Photo by Tom Van Eynde.