Art: Close to Home

Andrew Wyeth, 31, is one of the narrowest of young U.S. artists—and one of the most widely respected. He is a portraitist who paints only his friends, and a landscapist who portrays only two localities. His new pictures, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, owed nothing to the prevailing distortions of Paris: they were in the straightforward, realistic U.S. tradition of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Bleak as a December dawn, they seemed a startling contrast to the cheerful, crop-headed young man who had painted them.

Up in the Attic. One, entitled Christina’s World had cost Wyeth 3½ months of steady work. “I’d go up to Christina’s attic every morning at 8:30,” he recalled, “and not come down until supper time. Christina’s a close friend of mine and crippled. Every other day she drags herself across the field from her house to visit the graves of her family. People might call that a gloomy thing to paint, but I don’t look at it that way.”

A Wyeth portrait of Christina took second prize at last month’s Carnegie Exhibition (TIME, Oct. 25). “It looks sort of photographic,” Wyeth admits. “I guess they all do, but the fact is I never paint from nature. I make careful sketches and then change everything around. For instance the field in Christina’s World is not really that large, but I felt it that way. Ever since I was a small kid I felt it was big. For a month and a half I built the ground up, to make it come toward you, that surge of earth.”

Every blade of grass in the picture is separately painted. “Just because something is tightly done doesn’t mean anything,” Wyeth says, “but I feel that the more you get into the textures of things, the less you have to clutter up the composition with a lot of props. When you lose simplicity you lose drama, and drama is what interests me. I guess I’m just an illustrator at heart.”

Down in Maine. Sickly as a boy, Wyeth kept close to the studio of his father, famed Illustrator N. C. Wyeth. (“Ever since I was twelve, nothing has meant anything to me except painting.”) But while his father brought knights, pirates and Scottish chiefs to life, illustrating books like Treasure Island and the Boys’ King Arthur, young Andrew became more & more fascinated with illustrating the little universe around him—at Chadds Ford, Pa., where he was born, and down east in Maine, where the family spent its summers. He lives now with his wife and two sons within a mile of his Pennsylvania birthplace.

“I tramp around there day after day,” he says, “looking for something to paint. Mood is what I’m after. I go through hell to get a good subject, but once I do I’m happy because it’s always something I feel close to.”