Of Plush and Imitation Knotty Pine

H. C. Westermann’s sculptures The Plush (1963) and Imitation Knotty Pine (1966)—are representative of his occasionally facetious response to concurrent sculptural practices in the United States. A close look at his media, production, form, and content reveals a disaffection for the then-fashionable emphases on industrial materials and technologies, material specificity, and reductive form that were linked to David Smith and, later, the minimalists. Like Marisol and Robert Arneson, Westermann rejected modernist ideas about sculpture. This article offers an historically grounded, contextual analysis of these two works and unearths an extensive web of references and allusions. Westermann’s response to modernist and minimalist practices was a refusal of aesthetic autonomy for an art that openly celebrated, even insisted upon, a democratic ethos.