American male painters

John Wesley (November 25, 1928 – February 10, 2022) was an American painter, known for idiosyncratic figurative works of eros and humor, rendered in a precise, hard-edged, deadpan style. Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a comic-strip style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared-down compositions. His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair.Early on, art critics categorized Wesley as a Pop artist, due to his appropriation of the visual language and, at times, iconography of popular culture. Later critics, however, regarded him as an art outsider whose work eluded categorization, noting among other things, his psychological plumbing of a (largely male) American unconscious, formal affinities with abstraction, and wide-ranging art-historical borrowings. Artforum's Jenifer Borum described Wesley's work as combining "a Pop vocabulary, a refined Minimal sensibility, and a surrealistic proclivity for uncanny juxtapositions," while Dave Hickey likened him to an eighteenth-century Rococo "fabulist," citing his penchant for erotic narrative.Wesley's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Portikus (Frankfurt), and the Chinati Foundation, among others. It belongs to public art collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Francisco Alonzo "Frank" Martínez (August 9, 1924 – August 17, 2013) was an American artist. He painted murals of his Mexican American heritage.

John Altoon (November 5, 1925 – February 8, 1969) was an American artist. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Armenian parents, from 1947 to 1949 he attended the Otis Art Institute, from 1947 to 1950 he also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in 1950 the Chouinard Art Institute. Altoon was a prominent figure in the LA art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Baxter Museum, Pasadena, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (opened June 2014).

Taro Yamamoto (October 29, 1919 – June 12, 1994) belonged to the New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris.

Ben Weiner (born November 10, 1980) is an American contemporary artist.
Weiner was born in Burlington, Vermont, and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2003 and completed an independent study in painting at the Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Mexico. In 2003, Weiner worked as an assistant in the studio of Jeff Koons.Blobs of paint can appear as organic terrains and hyperpigmented, trompe-l'œil manscapes. His paintings chart the evolving topologrqphy of his platelet, with the process creation of one painting generating source imagery for the next. Weiner's works weld glamour with the organic while reconsidering the cycle of nature and artificiality. His work also focuses on the daily experience of disassociation and imitation in the digital age, as well as the merging of object, subject and medium.Weiner's work has been included in exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Carnegie Art Museum (Oxnard, California), The Riverside Art Museum, and Artspace. His work is in collections including Sammlung Mondstudio (Germany), Progressive Insurance (Ohio), and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation.Weiner also designed video projections for the interdisciplinary theatrical production of La Historia de Llorar por El by Ignacio Apolo.

Samuel David Smith (born Thorndale, Texas, on February 11, 1918 — May 23, 1999) was an American artist.

Joseph Michael Plavcan (July 19, 1908 – February 7, 1981) was an American painter and teacher from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Samuel Bookatz (October 3, 1910 – November 16, 2009) was a prolific painter who defied the demands of his blue collar, Orthodox Jewish upbringing to study art in the United States and Europe. Bookatz painted in a variety of styles: for commissions with presidential, military, political, and civic portraits; for religious and secular frescoes; and mostly for his own vision. In his private art, he developed from a realistic style to impressionist paintings, later to figurative expressionist and to increasingly abstract expressionist themes.

Karl Zerbe (September 16, 1903 – November 24, 1972) was a German-born American painter and educator.

Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. (November 9, 1913 – October 3, 1993) was an African American visual artist and art conservator. Hines served as a conservator at several institutions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and his paintings can be found in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.