Art: The Young Realist

In the glossy generalities of contemporary art criticism, “realist” and “old fogy” are nearly synonymous. Yet one of the nation’s boldest painters is Realist Andrew Wyeth, 41.

A fiery man who thinks much on death, a craftsman who submerges his craft in seas of mood, a hermit filled with feeling for people, Wyeth touches contemporary hearts as few native painters ever have. One measure of the fact: his first Manhattan show in five years at the Knoedler Galleries this week sold out (at prices up to $35,000) the day it opened. A better measure lay in the faces of those who came just to look. They would begin by admiring, which is easy, and then after a time they would fall silent and look inward, storing his pictures in their minds.

American Romance. Wyeth is limited. Compared with such a robust realist as Velásquez, he seems hardly to believe in reality. Compared with such a profound explorer-in-imagination as Pieter Brueghel, he sits by the stove cozily sketching. In context, his art has eminence. But the context is a shallow sea, shored by the book illustrations of his father, N. C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth, and bounded at the horizon by the craggy islands of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.

Not wishing, apparently, to pass beyond those islands—which may yet represent the farthest outposts of American painting—Wyeth reaches and tacks about, fishing for details as if they were really whales. His most ambitious pictures are sometimes the least successful, being too finicky and insistent. But Roasted Chestnuts bids fair to rival Wyeth’s famed Young America (TIME, July 16, 1951) as a national icon. Young America shows a boy in G.I. castoffs riding a gaudy bicycle across a limitless plain. Roasted Chestnuts gives new depth to the romance. It looks like the same boy, grown to gangly youth. He stands light and tall beside his homemade chestnut stove, at the edge of a bare, wintry highway, awaiting all the world.

Underlying Life. Even more surprising as a whole are Wyeth’s new watercolors, pictures done swiftly in passion. His instinct for the medium has grown out of discipline, and his command of it is athletic—brushmanship like swordsmanship. Wyeth’s Cormorants inhabit a small island off the Maine coast, near his summer home. “I rowed over,” Wyeth says in his high, dry voice. “There was a terrific shrieking and neck-turning. The picture took only half an hour, but the birds kept dropping on me all the time. There was a strange feeling of aloneness —of the cormorants not wanting you. They kept talking among themselves.” In its sparse, swift strokes, the picture conveys that arrogant freedom of the wild and unbeholden.