John Wesley’s Missouri Compromise, 1976, presents two men in suits, possibly politicians, in a moment of tense confrontation. The taller figure at left holds the collar of the shorter, sneering man, as they glare at one another. Characteristically for Wesley, who received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for his accomplishments in painting in 1976, the picture plane is shallow, with a flat, limited color palette that denies an excess of interpretive context. What could be a specific, political issue transforms into an archetype, a representation of snarling power dynamics at work.
Dating to the same period as the artist’s exhibition Patriotic Tableaux, Robert Elkin Gallery, New York, 1976, to mark the bicentenary of American Independence, Missouri Compromise engages one of the thorniest legislative decisions in American history: the Missouri Compromise of 1820. With this act of legislation, the state of Maine entered the United States as a “free state,” under the condition, or compromise, that Missouri would enter as a “slave state,” in which the enslavement of African people and people of African descent was legal and encouraged. The Missouri Compromise laid bare how the human right to freedom had become a political issue in the United States, leveraged by lawmakers at will towards wider political ends, such as statehood or favorable economic conditions.
Painting in the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s impeachment, Wesley’s treatment of the Missouri Compromise expands beyond the specific legislative issue of its title to engage the wider popular distrust of American politicians in the late 1970s. The composition of Missouri Compromise is close, cut like a cartoon still so that Wesley’s politicians are focused only on themselves, and the power dynamic between them, rather than any unseen constituents. As curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev writes, “Under the surface of [Wesley’s] absurd utterances, a scathing commentary of society, superficiality, power or abuse can be found, if only one wants to looks for it.”i