Andrew Wyeth, Famed and Infamous Artist, Dies at 91
Published: January 16, 2009
Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists from tiny Chadds Ford, Penn., whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, has died at his home in suburban Philadelphia, The Associated Press reported.
Andrew Wyeth/North Carolina Museum of Art
Andrew Wyeth's "Winter," 1946.
Related
Times Topics: Andrew Wyeth
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Andrew Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pa., 1997.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
He was 91.
Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.
Because of his popularity, a bad sign to many art world insiders, Wyeth came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.
Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”
John Updike took up the same cause 25 years later: “In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the scorn was simple gallery politics; but resistance to Wyeth remains curiously stiff in an art world that has no trouble making room for Photorealists like Richard Estes and Philip Pearlstein and graduates of commercial art like Wayne Thibauld, Andy Warhol, and for that matter, Edward Hopper.”
A minority opinion within the art world always tried to reconcile Wyeth with mainstream modernism. It was occasionally argued, among other things, that his work had an abstract component and was linked to the gestural style of artists like Kline, de Kooning and Pollock, for whom Wyeth expressed general disdain. It is true that especially some of the early watercolors of the 30’s and 40’s, in a looser style, inclined toward abstraction. Contrary to what detractors and some supporters said, his style vacillated over the years, which suited neither those who wanted to say he stayed in a rut his whole career nor those who championed him as a model, as one art historian put it, “of continuity and permanence in the face of instabilities and uncertainties of modern life.”
Wyeth remained a polarizing figure even as the traditional 20th century distinction between abstraction and avant-gardism on the one hand and realism and conservatism on the other came to seem woefully inadequate and false. The only indisputable truth was that his art existed within an American context that encompassed on the one end illustrators like his father, N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, and on the other end landscape painters like John Marin, Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt and Fitz Hugh Lane.
One picture encapsulated his fame. “Christina’s World” became an American icon like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” or Whistler’s portrait of his mother or Emmanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Wyeth said he thought the work was “a complete flat tire” when he sent originally it off to the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. The Museum of Modern Art bought it for $1,800.
Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, “like a crab on a New England shore,” he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate. Olson is shown in the picture from the back. She was 55 at the time. (She died 20 years later, having become a frequent subject in his art; her death made the national news thanks to Wyeth’s popularity.)
It is impossible to tell her age in the painting or what she looks like, the ambiguity adding to the overall mystery. So does the house, which Wyeth called a dry-bone skeleton of a building, a symbol during the Depression of the American pastoral dream in a minor key, the house’s whitewash of paint long gone, its shingles warped, the place isolated against a blank sky. As popular paintings go, “Christina’s World” is remarkable for being so dark and humorless, yet the public seemed to focus less on its gothic and morose quality and more on the way Wyeth painted each blade of grass, a mechanical and unremarkable kind of realism that was distinctive if only for going against the rising tide of abstraction in America in the late 1940’s.
”Oftentimes people will like a picture I paint because it’s maybe the sun hitting on the side of a window and they can enjoy it purely for itself,” Wyeth once said. “It reminds them of some afternoon. But for me, behind that picture could be a night of moonlight when I’ve been in some house in Maine, a night of some terrible tension, or I had this strange mood. Maybe it was Halloween. It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.”
He also said: “I think the great weakness in most of my work is subject matter. There’s too much of it.”
Nonetheless, the perception of Wyeth’s art as an alternative to abstraction accounted for a good portion of its enduring popularity during the mid-years of the last century. Added to this was his personality: self-theatricalizing (his biographer, Richard Meryman, described him as a “self-promoter” and a “closet showman”), Wyeth was not a bohemian, or at least he behaved contrary to the cliché of the bohemian artist. He was also a vocal patriot, which endeared him to some quarters during the Cold War and dovetailed with a general sense that his art evoked a mythic rural past embedded in the American psyche. “America’s absolutely it,” he once said.
Related
Times Topics: Andrew Wyeth
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Never mind that he painted mostly bleak portraits of a barren country: he stayed in the public imagination for nostalgic paintings like “Young America,” from 1950, of a boy cycling across a plain, which Wyeth in an interview in Time magazine related to “the plains of the Little Bighorn and Custer and Daniel Boone and a lot of other things.”
In later years, the press noted when he voted for Nixon and Reagan, not because he was a particularly outspoken partisan in his political views but because he differed in those views from other artists who were very outspoken at the time. Bucking the liberal art establishment, and making a fortune in the process, allowed him to play a familiar American role: the free-thinking individualist who at the same time represented the vox populi. A favorite saying of his was: “What you have to do is break all the rules.” And as bohemianism itself became institutionalized, Wyeth encapsulated the artistic conservatives’ paradoxical idea of cultural disobedience through traditional behavior.
Wyeth’s admirers made a point of tracing his roots deep into the American past, to Nicholas Wyeth, who emigrated from England to Cambridge, Mass., in 1645. Wyeths died fighting in the French and Indian War. Andrew Newell Wyeth III was born on July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, Penn., the fifth child of Carolyn and Newell Convers Wyeth, the great illustrator. Famous for his blood-and-thunder magazine illustrations, posters, advertisements and illustrations for “Treasure Island,” “Robin Hood,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Robinson Crusoe,” which sold in the millions of copies, N.C. Wyeth became a role model, teacher and inevitable point of comparison in Andrew’s pursuit of his own career as an artist. The situation repeated itself a generation later when Jamie followed his father Andrew as an artist.
N.C. was a big man with tremendous energy, a kindly tyrant as a father, according to his children, who also remembered him for his flash temper. He created a hothouse environment in which Andrew, a frail boy who came down with one after another illness, was taught at home. His life was both sheltered and obsessively focused. He learned to be a proficient draftsman before he learned to read well. By his teens, he was doing illustrations under his father’s name. Nevertheless, he resisted the goal that his father had for him of becoming an illustrator.
”Pa kept me almost in a jail,” Wyeth recalled, “just kept me to himself in my own world, and he wouldn’t let anyone in on it. I was almost made to stay in Sherwood Forest with Maid Marion and the rebels.”
By the 1920’s, N.C. Wyeth had become a huge celebrity visited by other celebrities like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary Pickford. The insularity, the familial competition, the theatrical personalities in and around the house, the atmosphere of commercial success and popular fame with its taint of artistic compromise — the presumption that realistic representation was intrinsically a virtue: all these factors shaped Andrew Wyeth’s life and evolution.
While he admired his father’s intensity, which he hoped to match, his imagery differed from his father’s. N.C.’s work was full of action and drama. Andrew’s work often had no people in it. He painted snowy landscapes under leaden skies, a barn with a door ajar, an abandoned house, tire tracks, a wedding tent in an empty field, fishermen’s nets hung to dry in the breeze: images of absence, silence, loss, abandonment, desolation but also expectation. One of his famous paintings was a God’s eye view of soaring turkey buzzards. Another showed an empty dory on a beach with a swallow swooping past.
No comments:
Post a Comment