William Wegman Paintings
Wegman’s colorful “Postcard Paintings” in recent shows and a book
Best known for the photographs he has done over the years of his beloved Weimaraner dogs in unforgettable anthropomorphic poses and costumes, William Wegman was actually trained as a painter. “I studied painting in art school,” he says, “but by the time I graduated in the 1960s, painting was dead.” So he took up photography and video instead, achieved extraordinary success, and then decided to return to painting in the ’80s. He’s also a collector of vintage postcards, and while working on a book project he decided to use actual postcards within his paintings as a way of meshing real and imaginary space, photography and painterly effects. These “Postcard Paintings” were highlighted in a solo show at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York and a satellite show at another New York gallery, Magenta Plains, in April. But even if you’ve missed these exhibits, you can enjoy a wide selection of Wegman’s work in the newly published William Wegman: Paintings, from Abrams Books, which includes commentary by radio comic Bob Elliott, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean and others.
To create his postcard paintings, Wegman typically mounts one or more vintage postcards onto a wood panel, then expands the landscape or subject within them onto the surrounding area, blending them visually and, often, ironically. In Mies and Corbusier on Vacation (below and on Art page), for example, he takes a postcard of a Miami sunroom and uses the modernist pattern on the floor to envelop the scene in a spiraling web. In Lobby Abstract (below), he uses two vintage hotel postcards and incorporates them into an interior with a Hans Hofmann painting, with its distinctive “push and pull” of color. And in The Great Indoors (top), a 16-foot-wide panorama, he sequences several postcard scenes into a giant room with windows, a fantasia of architecture and perspective.
“I’ve always been interested in things that make you wonder: What could be just outside the field of view?,” Wegman said in a recent interview. “What could be just outside the edge of the postcard? I remember finding a watercolor postcard in my grandma’s collection that was done of Provincetown Harbor. I tried to remember what else was in that scene….”
