World war II gave some american writers images that burned deep to the core of their work and became, sometimes, its chief theme: the bombing of Dresden for Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), the contradictory lunacies of command for Joseph Heller (Catch-22). This scarcely ever happened to American painters or sculptors. But to one in particular it did. It was war, as much as anything else, that made an artist out of H.C. (Horace Clifford) wester-mann Jr., that imbued him with raucous suspicion of the "normal" life he was supposed to be defending and filled him with horrible sights, now bleak and now baroque, whose exorcism would become a lifetime task.
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