Iconographer job2/26/2023 ![]() ![]() The trauma of his father’s death had a profound impact, and the young Mr. He spent a year in an orphanage before his mother, Elsa Marie Patzwaldt, who worked for the Los Angeles Telephone Company, remarried and took him back. His father, Ner, named for an Old Testament patriarch, returned home one Saturday in 1934 from his job at a hardware store and died of a stroke on the family’s bathroom floor, where his son, then 5, found him “with his shoes still on,” as Mr. Wesley used throughout his career to translate newspaper and magazine imagery onto canvas with hallucinatory alterations, his eyes twinkled mischievously. When his dealer held up a piece of the gridded, pencil-marked tracing paper that Mr. He hated talking about his work and would go only so far as to concede a stray formal affinity with other artists, past or present. Wesley was of no help in clearing up any of the confusion. Judd seemed uncharacteristically at a loss to explain exactly why. Wesley’s paintings alongside masterpieces of Minimalism and other rigorously spare work at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, though Mr. Through the years, critics also described him variously as a “Surrealist secret agent,” a sly eroticist, a latter-day manifestation of Rococo, a renegade Color Field artist and a “Greek vase painter by way of Aubrey Beardsley.” He tolerated the label of Pop artist, he said, mostly because it got him into shows. Wesley, who was known as Jack, had the great distinction and occasional critical misfortune of eluding almost every attempt at categorization. In a prolific career of more than five decades, Mr. ![]() His death was confirmed by Fredericks & Freiser, the New York gallery that has represented his work for many years. ![]() John Wesley, a painter of flat, cartoonish figures that seemed to spring not from the well of Pop Art but from some deeper, stranger reservoir of the American unconscious inhabited by floating babies, rubbery nudes and the hapless comic-strip husband Dagwood Bumstead, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. ![]()
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