FROM OUR FILES: Andrew Wyeth - show probes the man and his art

This theme might sound too academic on paper, but it is quite exciting to the eye, for it affords the viewer a rare glimpse into the mysteries of the creative process. Instead of confronting a finished painting one scrutinizes the intracacies of its evolution - the adjustments of size and scale, the addition or deletion of detail, the metamorphosis of color and texture. In "Christina's World," for example, we see how the artist struggled to create just the right mood, an evocation of fatigue and longing, in the crook of her arm.

CATALOG CAPTURES CONVERSATION

The other innovative element in this exhibition is the importance of the catalog, which in some respects is more interesting than the exhibition. In keeping with his scholarly approach Mr. Hoving engaged Wyeth in a series of taped conversations over the course of five days. The catalog is a distillation of those conversations, Wyeth's first major discussion of his art in 15 years.

One could complain that the heavy reliance of the visual on the verbal for explication reflects a creeping modernist tendency in the face of so much inscrutable art, but the fact remains that Wyeth's commentary deserves to stand as one of the most poetic art-historical documents of our times.

Wyeth is an artist of prodigious intution and self-awareness, who can uncover the emotional roots of his paintings with a sensitivity surpassing that of any observer. For example, he compared his beloved Maine and Pennsylvania: "Maine to me is almost like going to the surface of the moon. I feel things are just hanging on the surface and it's all going to blow away. In Maine, everythng seems to be dwindling with terrific speed."

"In Pennsylvania, there's a substantial foundation underneath, of depths and dirt and earth. Up in Maine I feel it's all dry bones and desiccated sinews. That's actually the difference between the two places to me."

BRITTLE, BONY, AUSTERE

One can feel in his Maine paintings the brittle quality of the air, the boniness of the landscape, the austerity of the life. And in the Pennsylvania paintings the dark, heavy soddenness of the earth and atmosphere is palpable to all the senses. This is partly a result of his microscopic attention to detail and partly of his medium.

Wyeth paints most often in tempera, praising it because "there's no limitation. The only limitation is yourself. Tempera is, in a sense, like building, really building in great layers the way the earth itself was built. It all depends on what you have in the depths of your being....I really like tempera because it has a cocoonlike feeling of dry lostness - almost a lonely feeling."

Although Wyeth is a realist in the technical sense, the reality he paints is an intensely personal one. His subtle, restrained, allusive paintings are charged with thinly veiled emotion, which is nowhere more perceptible than in his portraits of the Kuerners and the Olsons. Wyeth is a master of psychological nuance, and, like the great naturalistic writer Thomas Mann, he can convery as much about a person through a gesture or the minutae of his environment as his entire image.

SUBJECT NOT THERE

In some of Wyeth's most unforgettable portraits the subject is not even there. He told Mr. Hoving, "I think a person permeates a spot, and that lost presence makes the environment timeless to me. A lost presense keeps the area alive." Thus, a room, a house, a table setting, such as Karl Kuerner's in "Ground Hog Day" become "the very essence of the man who wasn't there."

In this sense Wyeth's painting is the epitome of the "less is more" precept, an application of measure and effacement that the artist extends even to himself. So intense is his involvement and his control of its expression that Wyeth loses himself in his work and can say quite matter-of-factly, "I don't think I exist really as a person, particularly, I really don't and I'd rather not."

Previous

1 | 2