The American Dream, to an Outsider

The image of a grinning skull, set between a fiery pit and a lightning storm, greets visitors to “See America First: The Prints of H.C. Westermann.” And before you make it through a small gallery off the entryway of Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, you see a naked woman cartwheeling from the top of a tall building, a blood-red “Death Ship” drifting aimlessly at sea, the aftermath of a train wreck, the explosion of the Hindenburg and six other air disasters, including rocket ships plummeting from the sky and jets slamming into the sides of skyscrapers.

If such reality-based devastation isn’t enough to get your attention, the two biggest works in this gallery travel to the far reaches of the galaxy to deliver even more chaos and mayhem. “Red Planet ‘J’ ” and “Green Planet Pi” depict tiny spacemen whose futuristic outposts are being overrun by aliens that resemble genetically altered dinosaurs and the mutant offspring of an enormous lobster and Sesame Street’s Big Bird. In two smaller prints, the “Human Fly” and the “Human Canonball” perform daredevil acts without safety nets.

This is the stuff of tabloid headlines. In Westermann’s hands, however, it’s also the raw material for a sobering portrait of American culture.

Life in the United States may be as vulgar and cheesy as it is vicious and cheap, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for honesty amid the overblown sensationalism. Both are hallmarks of the 53 images Westermann (1922-81) printed from 1962 to 1977. They have been brought together for the first survey of his graphic works. Organized by the David and Alfred Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the accessible yet far from easygoing show runs concurrently with a retrospective of Westermann’s terrifically out-of-step sculptures at MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary.

“See America First” is a comprehensive exhibition that stands on its own and shouldn’t be missed by anyone who visits its counterpart in downtown Los Angeles. Accompanied by an informative catalogue raisonne, it paints a poignant picture of one man’s love of a country he felt most at home in when he kept his distance from its social conventions.

Almost half of the images in the entry gallery are page-sized black-and-white works Westermann made from commercially produced blocks of Linoleum. Inspired by 1930s movies (like “The Bat Whispers”) and illustrated magazines (like Air Wonder Stories), most depict imaginary aerial disasters.

Three include cheery Christmas greetings, along with the date and salutations from the artist. One diptych uses an old-fashioned railroad crossing sign to spell out “X-mas!” Its right half is blank, to be filled in with messages Westermann would write to friends.

The rest of the works in this gallery consist of two garishly colored woodcuts, the tumbling “Mad Woman” and the soaring “Human Canonball,” and Westermann’s first lithographs, a series he printed at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1967. These include the smoldering “Death Ship of No Port” (based on a German novel); the rat infested “Port of Shadows” (based on a French film); the loony pair of extraterrestrial landscapes (based on such American sci-fi movies as “Red Planet Mars” and “Rocketship X-M”); and the black-and-white “Woman From Indianapolis” (based on Westermann’s drive from Chicago to Kansas City, Mo.)

At once foreboding and slapstick, this image stands out for its tight-lipped strangeness. Like a curdled version of an Edward Hopper painting of a small-town filling station, Westermann’s picture is as enigmatic as a street scene by De Chirico and as biting as a newspaper illustration by Mexican political cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada. It also anticipates his next suite of prints, which, installed in the main gallery, is the centerpiece of the show.

In 1968, Westermann spent 2 1/2 months at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles printing his 17-piece series, “See America First.” Where his homemade, disaster-themed greeting cards put a twisted spin on their mass-produced counterparts, his idiosyncratic travel posters depict a world that’s unlike anything advertised by the tourist industry.

In contrast to the Great Northern Railroad and the Gray Line Sightseeing Co., both of which used similar phrases and formats to promote trips to specific destinations, Westermann’s works focus on the interior landscape of the imagination. They are among his most understated and open-ended pictures. Gone is the loopy, over-the-top drama of his earlier pieces. In its place is the fascinating stillness of an image that sometimes gets stuck in your head when your mind wanders off on its own.

Individually numbered, like flash cards, each print is also emblazoned with the title of the series. In one, Bibendum, the trademark of the Michelin Tire Co., marches across the desert, followed by his silhouetted doppelganger. In another, a stick figure makes haste down an empty city street. In the rest, a pack of rats flees a sinking ship, a pair of sharks swims along a wildly sculpted coast, Davy Crockett presides over a castle’s tower, and a pastel-tinted rainbow spills from the sides of a television, which also functions as a fountain.

A solemn Indian, a laser-eyed vixen, a gunslinger, a Day of the Dead skeleton and a rangy polar bear round out Westermann’s odd cast of characters, all of whom appear to be misfits stoically making their way through abandoned landscapes.

The absence of spectacular sights suggests that what Westermann liked best about his country was that it provided space to get away from it all, especially from people who won’t shut up long enough to have a thought of their own. The go-it-alone spirit of a die-hard do-it-yourselfer suffuses his images, in which solitude is a virtue and the passing landscape provides plenty to mull over.

Westermann’s final two series occupy a long side gallery. Printed in 1972 at Landfall Press in Chicago, “Six Lithographs” combines the narrative force of his early works with the silent alienation made palpable by “See America First.” Lush jungle landscapes, active volcanoes, Technicolor sunsets, lonely piers and godforsaken deserts serve as the backdrops for anxiety-laced trysts, standoffs between strange beasts, melancholic walks in the moonlight and lectures by Jesus.

These are Westermann’s most technically sophisticated lithographs, often combining up to nine colors in mixtures that rival the subtlety of watercolors. Razor-sharp draftsmanship provides additional nuance.

For some reason, Westermann did not include “Crash in the Jungle” (based on a Chester Morris film written by Nathanael West) and “Oomu” (based on Melville’s 1847 novel “Omoo”) in his handsomely boxed suite of six prints. But they’re presented here, along with numerous studies, preparatory drawings and multiple versions of various images, including a handful of cancellation proofs--the last run of an edition, printed after its stone had been marked with a giant “X” or a graffiti-like scrawl.

Being able to compare and contrast Westermann’s drawings and watercolors with his finished prints is one of the show’s biggest pleasures. Consider his final suite of seven woodcuts, “The Connecticut Ballroom,” which he executed in 1975-76, just after he moved into his new studio in Brookfield Center, Conn. The first of the suite’s prints is “The Green Hell,” in which a naked man battles a python. Its supersaturated colors and jarring graphics pack more punch than the two drawings it is based on. The same goes for “Arctic Death Ship” and “The Dance of Death (San Pedro).”

In contrast, Westermann softens the colors in his printed versions of “Deserted Airport N.M.” and “Popeye and Pinocchio,” which shows the cartoon sailor punching a blue cactus as the crudely carved puppet looks on in horror. Both images have the sun-faded feel of objects left in the desert. The bare white spaces in all of these woodcuts are animated by the worm-like fibers in the handmade Natsume paper.

The final print is a stark black-and-white image of an elephant’s graveyard. At its bottom appears Westermann’s initials under his personal symbol, an old-fashioned anchor.

Although some viewers see this image as an instance of the artist meditating on his own mortality, it’s more accurate--and truer to the spirit of the rest of the show--to see it as Westermann’s view of what it means to belong to a group. For the unrepentant individualist, fitting into a community of like-minded look-alikes is death.

Long before American institutions embraced art as a token of feel-good community-building, the peripatetic artist demonstrated that eccentricity is the heart and soul of art that lasts longer than yesterday’s news. The irrepressible spirit of a sharp-eyed misfit lives on in Westermann’s unsentimental prints, which embody a vision of the American dream that has nothing to do with the consumption of bigger and better commodities and everything to do with a fierce commitment to inspiring ideals.

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“SEE AMERICA FIRST: THE PRINTS OF H.C. WESTERMANN,” University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach. Dates: Through July 28. Closed Mondays. Prices: Suggested donation is $3 for adults, $1 for students. Phone: (562) 985-5761.

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David Pagel is a regular contributor to Calendar.