Touche Boucher John Wesley's Gallant Subjects

LONG A CULT FAVORITE, PAINTER JOHN WESLEY RECEIVES AN OVERDUE FIRST U.S. RETROSPECTIVE, ON VIEW THROUGH NOVEMBER AT NEW YORK'S P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER. TO MARK THE OCCASION, DAVE HICKEY OFFERS AN APPRECIATION OF THE POP ECCENTRIC'S WRY AND WHIMSICAL FOUR-DECADE CAREER.

When post-global-warming anthropologists begin paddling through the streets of Manhattan in search of visible evidence that this republic was, in its tone and temper, the cosmopolitan democracy that it purported to be, one can only hope that the earnest scientists will stumble across a trove of John Wesley's paintings in some tenth-floor loft. If they do, they will almost immediately begin to think better of us. They will think, Hey! These weren't such bad dudes! How could they be? They were cool, generous, and urbane; they encouraged high spirits and valued sex enough to make it elegant and funny. They will be wrong, of course, since you and I both know that, should they fail to come upon this trove of Wesleys, further evidence of our levity, civility, and sanity will be hard to come by--thus, the virtue and necessity of John Wesley. He has always aspired to the best job available to an artist of his generation: Court Painter to the People, Purveyor of Popular Elegance, Ambienceur of the Democracy.

He has also lived an exquisitely charmed life--which is to say, a private one. Born John Mercer Wesley in Los Angeles in 1928, he began making paintings in 1953, while employed as an illustrator at Northrop Aircraft. He has continued to make them throughout the intervening forty-eight years. He moved to New York in 1960 and continues to reside there, living the life of a painter, exhibiting his work whenever he wants to, selling it whenever he needs to, and consorting with his peers. In the process, almost magically, Wesley has managed to assemble an enormous international constituency of devotees without once attracting the silly glare of paparazzo adulation, the resentful hysteria of political acrimony, or the cloudy glaze of educational explanation. In fact, Wesley's continuing vogue as a painter is, in its every aspect, more closely akin to that of a great jazz musician or songwriter than to that of an American artist. In the enclave of enthusiasts, he is simply John Wesley, an acknowledged master, the Co le Porter of painting. Those who know know; those who care care; those who don't know or care don't have a clue, but that's okay, too.

In recent years, when you come across references to Wesley, he is usually characterized as an eccentric Pop painter with surrealist tendencies. Which is true enough, I suppose, if we remember that 90 percent of Western painting from Giotto to Natoire is "surrealist" by contemporary standards, and if we take into account the broader agenda of Pop, which was always more about "art" than "pop." Even so, I cannot think of a single Pop or Surrealist painting whose narrative content we respond to as we do to Wesley's. Because John Wesley, when he wants to be, is really sexy--as sexy as a Tijuana Bible or a Boucher divertissement. This penchant for erotic narrative, I think, defines Wesley as more an eighteenth-century fabulist than a surrealist, and as a Pop artist only in the sense that Pop empowered the restoration of traditional genre in cartoon drag. So, we need to remember that, at the moment of Pop's inception, American art was starving in the midst of plenty, and that young artists like John Wesley, who bega n exhibiting in the early '60s, could hardly have failed to notice that, while modernist painting was obsessively refining itself out of existence, the full resources of historical art making, all of its traditional idioms and repertoire of emblematic imagery, lay immediately to hand, alive and available in the pastures of vernacular culture.

So, Pop brought it all back--in cartoon drag. Under its auspices, the tragic Magdalen reemerged as Marilyn in Andy Warhol's portraits; Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein mined the media bank to reinstate history painting as a serious genre; Tom Wesselmann revivified the odalisque; Wayne Thiebaud reconstituted nature morte in pastry-shop settings; and John Wesley reinvented the casual, libidinous allegories of Rococo painting for contemporary use. He was able to reinvent them effortlessly, in fact, and almost invisibly, because, even though Zeus adopted more orphaned maidens than Daddy Warbucks, the Ovidian idiom of erotic disguise remained intact and alive in the culture--and also because, during the ancien regime, the extravagant confections of Rococo painting functioned themselves as the "funny papers" of Versailles. Adorning palace hallways and drawing rooms, they provided veiled, amused commentary on the courtly life that took place before them, reveling in its cutthroat frivolity. So it wasn't a s tretch. Substitute the hegemony of Puritan values in America for the terrifying autocracy of the Bourbon kings and you have a new occasion for sophisticated inference, for allegorical eroticism in which things are heard without quite being said.