There is something kind of funny about The Contemporary Museum's exhibition of works by the late painter and sculptor H.C. Westermann.

Not quite ha-ha funny (although Westermann certainly had a sense of humor), funny like "more than meets the eye" funny.

Westermann must have cut quite a figure at parties back in the heady scene surrounding the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in the years after World War II: tattooed and muscular, a former Marine gunner and occasional acrobat, Westermann was a walking advertisement for the GI Bill, the 1944 legislation that, among other things, financed entire university educations for U.S. veterans.

Westermann fits the classic GI Bill profile — someone who in a previous generation would never have even contemplated going to college, let alone art school. Coming more or less straight from the battlefield to the classroom, guys like Westermann brought novel ideas, experiences and ways of doing things with them. You could argue that this is the precise moment in which American art actually became American.

Pre-dating the art institute grads who would come to be known as the Chicago Imagists, Westermann painted and sculpted with a brusque informality — sometimes.

Were all of the items in "Dreaming of a Speech Without Words" like "Chicago Joint" or the clever sculpture "Mad House," Westermann, who died in 1981, would fit into the Chicago art story in a neat manner: In Act 1, curators, critics and educators become interested in the work of untrained and/or "primitive" artists.

In Act 2, art schools are flooded with working-class folks who are regarded by their teachers with a mixture of fascination and condescension. These students are encouraged to grab their sketchbooks, hop on the bus and check out the folk and "primitive" art on display in the city's museums. They are encouraged to choose subjects from everyday life. (This is where Westermann ought to fit.) They do as they are told, and thus prepare the stage for Act 3, in which the next batch of artists will enter the world free from the constraints of classical training.

The thing is, though, some of the work in "Dreaming of a Speech Without Words" fits the bill — Westermann's appropriation of everyday objects (Coke bottles, a toy car) for his workmanlike sculptures, for example, or his cartoonish depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Others don't. "The Storm," a painting dominated by a black horse in mid-scream, is a dry technical exercise, derivative of Picasso's "Guernica." Same with "The Reluctant Acrobat," which reads as an attempt to master surrealist painting techniques and little else.

So there's the problem: a survey of Westermann's work reads like the senior portfolio show, and in a way it is; much of it was produced for classroom assignments.

The question isn't whether Westermann was reasonably talented (he was) or whether or not it is interesting to see the work of a student of visual art at an important institution at a pivotal time (it is), but why Westermann's work is being presented the way it is — with a consistency that it didn't necessarily have.

There is something incongruous about all this — this guy had a solo show at the Whitney in 1978 but doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. So what is going on?

Well, the uncertainty surrounding Westermann is tinged around the edges by the revolting and discredited notion of "outsider" art, a category created in the art world in the 1970s to house people who produced challenging and interesting work without any formal training, often from within the confines of mental hospitals.

The creation of a market demand for this work in this way was easily the most cynical moment in contemporary art history, allowing galleries to make money off of "outsider" artists while refusing to treat them as fully sentient human beings. The Simpsons summed it up best, when an art dealer explains enthusiastically to Homer that outsider art can be produced "by a mental patient, a hillbilly, or a chimpanzee!"

Westermann was and is an easy target for this sort of condescension. He was, after all, an outsider.

And this is why Contemporary Museum curator Michael Rooks' Westermann experiment ultimately succeeds. Its measured, thorough survey of the artist's entire career takes note of Westermann's eccentricities and Steinbeckish background without reducing all of his stuff to simply an expression of working-class quirkiness.

As if to prove this last point, the 10 artists (including local sculptor John Tanji Koga) featured in "Untitled (for H.C. Westermann)," running simultaneously in the museum's downstairs gallery, display a warm appreciation of Westermann's work and process that transcends the division between outsiders and insiders.

Joel Tannenbaum writes about the arts.