Contributed by David Carrier / Just to the left of my writing desk is a painting of a magnificent tree with bright orange blossoms. Below it is a now faded postcard of a drawing of Barbara Westman, who died earlier this year at age 95, and her husband Arthur Danto sitting on a sofa with their dogs Charlotte and Emilia. To the right, a work on paper shows Danto taking the dogs for a walk in Manhattan. These Westman pieces more than hold their own against the prints of old European master works, Japanese woodcut, and Bill Anthony drawings that surround them. Anytime I feel discouraged by the slow progress of my work or the political news, I need only look at them to be cheerful again.
I met Barbara Westman some 40 years ago. She had just moved from Boston to New York to marry Danto. I saw the two of them regularly on my trips to New York. After making the rounds of the galleries, one of my great pleasures was looking at her newest work. Her drawing of Danto and me on the cover of my The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (1994), is a parody of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère. She was an inspiration for that book. In the introduction, I write:
Every artist must envy her when her New Yorker cover art is seen everywhere, even in provincial cities like mine. She, as much as any painter of modern life, changes the very way we see the city in which art is displayed… My own favorite essay here, the title essay, is dedicated to her.
Later I say that someday I will write a catalogue essay for her and title it “The Painter of Modern Life.” Faced with her happy domestic situations, though, it seemed absurd – even presumptuous – to burden her work with critique. Now, in memory, the time seems right to lean forward a little.
Barbara was a professional book illustrator. Her work is on my mind because I’ve just written a book, forthcoming, about the English painter Julian Bell. When his father, Quentin Bell, was very young, he produced a family newspaper and asked his aunt – one Virginia Woolf – to submit a story. Her “The Widow and the Parrot” surprised him, for it is not at all in the style of her novels, but of course he published it. Much later, when Woolf became very famous, Quentin asked Julian to make illustrations for a new edition of the story. Illustrations can help plant serious literature in culture. Think of Gustave Doré’s pictures for Don Quixote, John Tenniel’s and later Dali’s for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Rockwell Kent’s for Moby-Dick. Picasso famously illustrated Lysistrata, Matisse Ulysses.
The determinedly pluralistic contemporary art world embraces abstract and figurative art, monochromatic works, pattern painting, storytelling pictures, depictions of fantasy, and pure geometry. Everything is in principle valid – except for work like Westman’s. Consider Saul Steinberg, primarily known as a cartoonist, who was amazingly ingenious and boldly experimental. Though he was admired by Danto, Ernst Gombrich, and Harold Rosenberg, the art world never really accepted him. Westman created 17 covers for The New Yorker, but however famous her images were, only very exceptionally, late in her career, did she have gallery shows.
Why this prejudice? For one thing, illustration is presumptively subordinate to text, and many of Westman’s pictures do accompany books. At the same time, of course, her picture of a tree cognizably shows a tree, without the aid of text. Roger Fry notes that an opera uses music, sets, and words to tell a story, combining three diverse art forms, and that the music can distract the audience from the words or the set. The experience might be like watching a circus juggler perform while hearing a pianist play Liszt with a movie running in the background. But Fry the formalist underplays the fact that that in opera, music, words, and sets can work synergistically.
The same goes for text and illustration. In Leah Komaiko’s I Like the Music, which Westman illustrated, a young girl who prefers music in the street resists going to the symphony with her grandmother. She discovers, however, that when the orchestra performs at night in the park, it too creates street music. In fact, the lucky girl is asked to conduct. Westman’s pictures aren’t merely collateral to this story; they vivify its serendipity. So far as I knew, however, it did not bother Westman that she was famous as an illustrator but invisible as a fine artist. Her peers took due note of her unique style, which seemed to blossom from a more conventional and homogenized approach when she moved from Boston to Manhattan. In a couple of books, Joachim Pissarro and I have called work like Westman’s – excluded from the galleries and museums yet demonstrably worthy – “wild art.”
In terms of content as well as style, her work can also be considered post-historical. Arthur Danto himself became a pre-eminent philosopher of art, arguing that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) marked the end of art’s developmental history and that we lived in a post-historical art world. He alluded to the Hegelian idea, discussed by Karl Marx and reclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War wound up, of the end of history as defined by class struggle. What we find in Westman’s art, I would propose, is a version of this post-historical world. In her utterly benign pictures, there are no real conflicts. Her figures, animal and human, are frumpy and generally middle-aged, yet almost always at play. There are no straight or jagged lines in her drawings, no industry or war. Her colors are intense, her people happy but unglamorous. Westman’s is a harmonious world, a veritable utopia, boldly aspirational. But Barbara was a resolutely intuitive artist, so I never would have articulated anything like this to her.
When our daughter Elizabeth was born in 1984, Westman did the birth announcement. In that blissful picture, Liz is surrounded by me and some of my books, my wife (her mother) Marianne Novy, our friends Joseph Masheck and Alexander Nehamas, and the art of our friend Sean Scully. And, of course, Danto’s books. Naturally biased but not necessarily wrong, I think the announcement – which perfectly captures a utopian moment – is Westman’s masterpiece.
About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism for Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
