Wright Auction

The present Elevated: Art Via Chicago auction includes works by iconoclastic artist H.C. Westermann that were dedicated to his confidant and collaborator, Jack Lemon, a groundbreaking printer/publisher who had a profound effect on the art world during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. While Westermann was highly regarded for his sculpture, painting, drawing, and collage during his career, his reputation has been further enhanced since his passing in 1981 as selected examples of his illustrated correspondence have come to light. These charmingly compelling works demonstrate the extent to which Westermann fully integrated art into his life. The Westermann lots on offer have been sourced directly from the collection of Jack Lemon.

Both key figures in the cultural history of Chicago, Westermann and Lemon became close friends in the 1960s. At the time, Lemon was working at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI), where he had established the first professional lithography workshop, KCAI Impressions, based in a school in 1965. Among the artists who produced lithographs with Lemon at KCAI Impressions were Westermann, Richard Diebenkorn, William McKim, Peter Saul, and Ernest Trova.

In 1967, Westermann accepted Lemon’s invitation to come to KCAI to create his first prints in color. Concurrently, some of Westermann’s sculptures and drawings were being exhibited at the KCAI Gallery. Lemon thus helped Westermann expand his oeuvre into printmaking. The pair made five lithographs at KCAI Impressions during that first run. Westermann would ultimately generate forty-five print editions over the course of his career through several outlets.

Westermann is celebrated as an artist who excelled in various modes. His flair for woodworking led him to practice sculpture initially after serving as a Marine during World War II and the Korean War. However, he also developed his own inimitable visual iconography through his paintings, drawings, collages, and prints. Furthermore, throughout his life as an artist, Westermann maintained extended, illustrated correspondence with a range of fellow artists and personal acquaintances. This included Lemon.

At the end of 1962 and 1964, Westermann created Christmas cards for Lemon that are some of his earliest attempts at block printing. In December 1967, after their time together at KCAI Impressions, Westermann headed west to attend his first retrospective show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To celebrate their recent partnership in Kansas City in a playful manner, Westermann sent Lemon an inscribed copy of the exhibition catalog in an illustrated envelope. On the first page of the catalog, Westermann drew a raccoon standing on one hand with a dedication above in which Westermann uses his nickname for Lemon, “Blackjack,” renders the four playing card suits, and signs off as Cliff, followed by an anchor, a recurring emblem of his time in the military.

Lemon went on to start the influential Landfall Press in Chicago in 1970. For over thirty years, until Lemon moved operations to Santa Fe in 2004, Landfall Press helped put Chicago on the map as a center of art publishing, making not only prints in various mediums, but also books, films, and records. Along with Westermann, Lemon collaborated to release editioned works by a host of major artists, including Robert Arneson, Roger Brown, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jim Dine, Richard Hunt, Sol LeWitt, Robert Lostutter, Ed Paschke, Kara Walker, Karl Wirsum, and many others. In 2020, Lemon would retire after a distinguished, fifty-year tenure as a printer and publisher.

Not long after Lemon started Landfall Press, Westermann stayed at the Chicago location in a small space within its top-floor workshop in 1972. This allowed Westermann to focus on what would become an ambitious project that evolved into the fantastic, almost post-apocalyptic, Suite of Six Lithographs, 1972. During his stay at Landfall, Westermann built furniture from shop crates, including a bookshelf, and drew many compositions apart from those that went into the eventual suite.

On a scrap of paper from the Landfall shop, Westermann made a striking, yet humorous, landscape drawing that he dedicated to his friend Lemon. The central image is a large orange that Westermann labeled, “Sunkist,” which references their upbringing as native Californians in Los Angeles who also became Marines, although at different times. Supposedly, Westermann told Lemon, when giving him the drawing, that “he drew an orange because lemons are too sour.”

Below the orange, Westermann dedicated the drawing, “For Jack,” and signed it, “from Cliff,” with the year, “72,” surrounding Westermann’s iconic anchor emblem, and his initials above along with two shark fins of a “death ship.” In the middle ground, a cow skull appears to gaze in the direction of the oversized orange, a shadowy figure likewise seems to look toward the orange, and a tall cactus looms. The background includes a somewhat elaborate pueblo construction with a mesa behind it, serendipitous markers of the move to Santa Fe that Lemon would make in 2004 when he relocated Landfall Press.

Westermann's gift for using humor to animate bleakness is a testament to his powerful ability to act as a witness to history. He also used this talent to give his correspondence a wryly elevated dimension, suggesting that, for Westermann, art was always personal.

Taken together, Westermann's mirthfully illustrated correspondence and desolate but lively desert drawing for Lemon suggest the range of Westermann's imaginative production on paper while offering a glimpse into an important friendship that shaped the course of late 20th century art in Chicago and beyond. Westermann's gift for using humor to animate bleakness is a testament to his powerful ability to act as a witness to history. He also used this talent to give his correspondence a wryly elevated dimension, suggesting that, for Westermann, art was always personal.