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American painter (1928–2022)

John Wesley (November 25, 1928 – February 10, 2022) was an American painter, known for idiosyncratic figurative works of eros and humor, rendered in a precise, hard edged, deadpan style. Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a comic strip style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared down compositions. His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair. Early on, art critics categorized Wesley as a Pop artist, due to his appropriation of the visual language and, at times, iconography of popular culture. Later critics, however, regarded him as an art outsider whose work eluded categorization, noting among other things, his psychological plumbing of a (largely male) American unconscious, formal affinities with abstraction, and wide ranging art historical borrowings. Artforums Jenifer Borum described Wesley's work as combining "a Pop vocabulary, a refined Minimal sensibility, and a surrealistic proclivity for uncanny juxtapositions," MoMA PS1, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Portikus (Frankfurt), and the Chinati Foundation, among others. It belongs to public art collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

John Mercer Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1928, to Elsa Marie Patzwaldt and Ner Wesley. Afterwards, he lived in an orphanage for a year, until his mother remarried and assumed custody. He began to make abstract expressionist paintings in the early 1950s despite a lack of any formal art training, eventually taking evening art classes while working blue collar jobs as a dishwasher, warehouse stocker and aircraft riveter. During this period Wesley developed close closest personal affiliations with minimalist artists Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt. In his later career, surveys of Wesley's work were held at the Stedelijk Museum (1993, travelling to Portikus);

Throughout his career, Wesley appropriated popular media imagery for his work. Critics, however, have deemed his recontextualizations more discomfiting and peculiar than those of Pop art, arguing that his style was largely a point of departure for subtle investigations of form and psychological content. preoccupations with personal memory, desire and fantasy rather than consumer, commercial and industrial imagery; Elaborating on his reading of Wesley as a fabulist, Dave Hickey wrote that Wesley "reinvented the casual, libidinous allegories of Rococo painting" for use as veiled, urbane commentary directed at the contemporary hegemony of Puritan values in America,

Wesley's visual fixations and style registered their strange, idiosyncratic qualities as early as 1963. He placed cartoonish, expressively posed group and individual portraits and historical figures in vacant spaces, framed by symmetrical, Art Nouveau like borders of flowers, birds or—in The Aviator's Daughters (1963)—silhouetted World War I biplanes, creating a counterpoint of masculine and feminine. thematically, they often took a farcical, yet incisive look at gender relations, paternal power and mortality. Jenifer Borum described these later paintings as conflating "the maternal and the erotic, effectively underscoring the infantile nature of the media's obsessional fragmentation and objectification of women." Unlike the ads, she noted, "For Wesley, the personal and the social are inseparable." The playwright and painter Patricia Broderick, who died in 2003, was his partner for the last six years of her life. Wesley died at his home in Manhattan, on February 10, 2022, at the age of 93. Blanton Museum of Art, Chinati Foundation, Harvard Art Museums, Hirshhorn Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Museum Ludwig (Germany), Museum of Modern Art, Rose Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam),