Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

William Wegman
American (b. 1943)
DOG WITH LETTUCE(1982)
Polaroid photograph
24" x 20'

STYLE: Photography,
conceptual art

 ©William Wegman

William Wegman's photographs of his dogs, Man Ray, and then Fay Ray, are famous not only in the world of fine art, but in popular culture as well, particularly in the areas of fashion and advertising. There is even a Wegman merchandising center, called William Wegman World.

Aside from the immediate accessibility of these works, they are masterpieces of ironic metaphor—as many critics have noted, Wegman's subjects have become symbolic of mankind, its foibles, failures, and follies, but always with a leavening dose of humor.
Wegman is known for his photography, but he has also done work in video and painting. His early work is associated with fellow 60s conceptual artists Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Robert Smithson. He first became known for his conceptual photographs and performances (captured on video). The Man Ray and Fay Ray photographs first became a major part of Wegman's oeuvre in 1979, when he started working with the large-format Polaroid 20x24 camera.

Wegman's photographs, videotapes, paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. A retrospective of his work traveled to museums throughout Europe and the United States including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In addition to video segments that have appeared regularly on Sesame Street since 1989, William Wegman has also created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon. His other works include the books Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, ABC, 123, Circle Triangle Square, Farm Days, and Mother Goose (all Hyperion), and the videos Alphabet Soup and FayÕs Twelve Days of Christmas. (WarnerVision).

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Brooks Adams, ARTnews, 1/90
"At 46 Wegman is the dog photographer, and although he often complains about being "nailed on the dog cross," Fay [his pet weimaraner] is also his meal ticket...In his pursuit of gallows humor, Wegman's great mentors were Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, and John Baldessari, California artists who launched a school of deadpan verbal and visual punning...Wegman's early videos can also be seen as send-ups of the narcissism and high serious methodology of much Conceptual and Process art...[Kim Levin quote:] 'Wegman's idiosyncratic humor, like Bob and Ray's, is off-center, vaudevillian, droll rather than witty, based on apparent incompetence rather than skill in repartee. Instead of cryptic comments and esoteric meanings, Wegman's humor is about disappointment and failure.'..
In 1978 Wegman began making large-scale Polaroids. ..Now, more than ever Man Ray became the subject of his art. Decked out in outrageous costumes and props that disguised the fact that the dog was in declining health and getting fat, Man Ray seemed to take on the whole history of art, almost like a canine vanitas...In 1982—the same year Wegman was given a retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—Man Ray died...Wegman's predicament seems clear. He knows that the dog photographs are a sure thing...It has become customary to juxtapose the Man Ray and Fay Ray oeuvres...A large retrospective of all aspects of Wegman's work opening at the Lucerne Kunstmuseum in May[1990]...will present the opportunity to see if he is essentially a protean artist capable of expressing himself in any medium."

James Auer, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 12/19/01
"The current show, at the Haggerty Museum of Art, dates back to the days when Wegman was a very young man, teaching on small campuses in the University of Wisconsin system. It reveals an aspiring artist still struggling to find himself in a variety of media but not at all reluctant to test his mettle in everything from photography and video — we see the beginning of the anthropomorphized dogs — to drawing and painting. As early as 1973, Wegman is dramatizing human foibles by means of clever, dog-centered narratives. Later on, these often poignant vignettes gain in gloss and slickness, but the basic format has by now been established. By 1978, the year of the grandly solemn photograph, "Man Ray Contemplating the Bust of Man Ray," he has worked out a key element of his satire: dogs invested with high intelligence, interacting with — and serving as surrogates for — human figures out of myth and history. Significantly, Wegman tends to use drawings to plan video works and installations, rather than for their own sake. Already by that time, it would seem, he is well into a production mode, pre-visualizing shot setups and subordinating the handmade image to its mechanically produced counterpart. "
Louise Roug, Los Angeles Times, 8/20/00
"Though he has been identified with different art movements—Dada, surrealism, performance, minimalism, pop and conceptual—Wegman is an iconoclast who revels in poking fun at art world pretensions, and often his dog portraits are visual puns. His photos are celebrations of the absurd. By using the dogs in a witty expose of the man-made world, Wegman seems to ask, "What is stranger—the dressed-up dog or the world of his master?" It's an illustration of the breadth of Wegman's appeal that he has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and has appeared on "The Late Show With David Letterman"—arguably three of the most important institutions of fame in America. And when the New Yorker decided to celebrate its 75th anniversary with its first photo cover, the magazine commissioned Wegman, who posed a Weimaraner as Eustace Tilley—the magazine's monocled dandy. Classic Wegman (and New Yorker) humor. "

Ferdinand Protzman, Washington Post, 11/11/99
"...that mass appeal sometimes obscures the real subject of Wegman's work, which is not dogs, but art. That distinction gets overwhelmed by the powerful emotional bond that exists between humans and canines. But the difference between dog art and art using dogs can be seen quite clearly in the fascinating exhibition of Wegman's new Polaroids and iris prints at David Adamson Gallery. The dogs are handsome, appealing and appear to actually enjoy complying with what Wegman asks of them. His demands, stripped of the costumes and props, are the basic dog commands: sit, stay, lie down, roll over. The point here is that Wegman is the creative force, not the dogs. He puts them in scenarios that often evoke and sometimes mock different artistic genres. "Lake Shore," for example, is a new triptych of iris prints in which it is hard to tell at first glance that any dogs are involved.
From a distance, the work looks like a Milton Avery landscape, with its flat fields of vibrant color forming the outlines of a lake with a stony shore and a forest and blue sky in the background. Get closer and the boulders in the foreground turn out to be the heads, backs and haunches of Wegman's Weimaraners, the texture and tawniness of their coats adding a lively new dimension to Avery's color theories. That idea—using a creature that is beautiful, alive, aware and inextricably linked to man as a way to blur the boundary between abstraction and reality and take the viewer inside the picture—is the essence of Wegman's art. It makes one think about Avery and, by extension, Matisse, whose post-Fauvist style Avery emulated. The picture is also funny in a nice sort of way. One can't help but wonder if Avery and Matisse would laugh at the idea of art going to the dogs. "