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See This: Martin Wong’s Popeye Paintings, on View in New York
Popeye the Sailor Man, the pugnacious cartoon figure popularized in the 1930s, is canonically heterosexual, but fans often interpret him as queer-coded. This was especially true for the painter Martin Wong, who died in 1999. Raised in San Francisco, Wong moved to New York in 1978, where he created variations on the character throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Some of them will be on view, along with other Wong pieces, at “Martin Wong: Popeye,” an exhibition opening April 18 at P·P·O·W in downtown Manhattan. Many works in the show feature Wong’s signature allover brick pattern, recalling the Lower East Side where he lived and worked for much of his career. One small piece depicts Popeye as a tattoo inked onto a crotch. Hung in an antique gilded frame, the painting illustrates Wong’s “fascination with elevating ostensibly low culture to a place of high status,” says Isaac Alpert, P·P·O·W’s director of estates. The exhibit also fulfills Wong’s intention to motorize his plywood cutouts of Popeye. Six such paintings appear in the show, each four feet tall and covered in Wong’s brick motif, with arms that rock up and down as if steering a ship. These works, Alpert says, are “a bittersweet reminder that, had we not lost him before his time to H.I.V., Lord knows what he could have gone on to accomplish.” “Martin Wong: Popeye” is on view from April 18 to May 30, ppowgallery.com.