Art: Within Limits

N.C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth was one of the U.S.’s best illustrators of children’s books. His son Andrew, 33, is one of the nation’s best landscape painters and portraitists. On exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, young Andrew’s paintings were as gloomy and realistic as his father’s had been gay and romantic. They were also vastly skillful, as far as they went.

No U.S. artist takes more pains over details than does Andrew Wyeth. If a picture is rich enough in detail, he figures, it can be dramatically simple in its overall effect. He once devoted three quarters of a painting to a grassy hillside, spent a month and a half brushing in each grass blade separately “to make it come toward you, that surge of earth.” Perfectionist though he is, Wyeth does not aim to please. The warmth, charm and dazzle of color are foreign to him; so are rhythmic arabesques of line. Using egg tempera and tiny brushes, he paints mostly with dull browns, greys and blacks, composes his pictures to create a deathly sense of stillness and balance rather than of flow.

Within the strict limits he sets himself, Wyeth’s carefully wrought tempera paintings almost invariably succeed in being both clear and convincing. Strangely enough, his watercolors, which he dashes off in a hurry, do too. In them his love of nature (preferably bleak) has much freer rein, and in them he proves himself a delicate and sensitive draftsman, not merely a careful one.

But the temperas, mostly records of the Pennsylvania countryside and Maine seacoast he knows best, are Wyeth’s chief work. The worst of them look unnecessarily labored, but the best make him a candidate for the mantle of the great Pennsylvania realist Thomas Eakins. That dour master specialized in dramatizing the obvious, as Wyeth does in his crystalline Spindrift. The earthier Eakins would never have attempted Soaring.