About H.C. Westermann

H.C. (Cliff) Westermann, born in Los Angeles in 1922, led a life that reads like the plot of a great American novel. As a young man, he worked in logging camps in the Pacific Northwest, witnessed kamikaze attacks as a Marine gunner on the USS Enterprise in WWII, and toured Asia as a performing acrobat with the USO. In 1947, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute under the GI Bill, left in 1950 to fight in the Korean War, then later returned to Chicago to complete his studies. Westermann had a Zelig-like tendency to find himself aligned with significant moments and figures in 20th century history: he sold his first sculpture to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1957. In 1959, he married fellow artist Joanna Beall, a former student of Josef Albers at Yale University. The couple moved in 1961 to Brookfield Center, CT, where they later built their own house and two art studios.

In 1967, he was among the crowd pictured on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. In 1968, while in residence at Tamarind LIthography Workshop in L.A., Westermann quickly became a beloved figure in the flourishing art scene, where he was friend and mentor to artists like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and Ken Price. One of Westermann’s first notable solo museum exhibitions was in 1968 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, alongside Billy Al Bengston’s gallery installation designed by the young, burgeoning architect, Frank Gehry, who also became a close friend of Cliff’s. In 1978, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a major retrospective of Westermann’s work, launching him into greater international visibility. By 1980, his career was accelerating, with exhibitions at museums across the U.S. and internationally. He and Joanna were nearly finished with their hand-built home – referred to as a large-scale sculpture by his artist friends – when Westermann tragically died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 58. Solo retrospectives of Westermann’s art have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Reina Sofia, Madrid (2019), and the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018).