Art: Above the Battle

It sometimes seems as if the U.S. art world will tear itself apart with all its cliques and cults, but there is one artist whose extraordinary vision keeps him well above the battle. Painter Andrew Wyeth is not influenced by other artists’ work; he rarely visits galleries, is wholly unaffected by “trends.” He is in a sense one of the most isolated of America’s top artists, yet his appeal is universal. Whether realists or abstractionists, artists admire him; he casts a spell over layman and sophisticate alike. His paintings, so static at first glance, are charged with emotion; his surface realism is a window to a higher reality beyond.

The Wyeth spell will be in full operation next week when Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery opens the largest (143 items) Wyeth exhibition ever held. In all his work, whether drawing, watercolor or tempera, there is no mistaking the impeccable technique, no ignoring the tense, if quiet, drama being played out within every frame. The America that Wyeth paints is only superficially the America of today; basically, it is a timeless place with timeless preoccupations. The long, long past of man and his earth is implicit in every Wyeth painting: his trees seem weighted by memories, his rooms are filled with ghosts.

A Private Walden. Henry Thoreau, summing up his own experience of the world, wrote. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.” Like Thoreau. Andrew Wyeth detests the idea of venturing beyond his own familiar Walden. He has traveled a good deal in Chadds Ford, Pa., where he spends his winters, and in rugged Port Clyde, Me., where he goes in summer.

His father, the noted illustrator N. C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth, originally settled in Chadds Ford to study with Howard Pyle. When young Andy showed signs of talent in his early teens, his father began to teach him every secret of technique he knew, but he never sought to impose his own style. “My father,” says Wyeth, “was a great teacher because he would never talk about how he would do anything. He would always talk about the object and the quality of that object. He might make you see the depth of the object, not how it should be painted.”

Sickly from birth, Andy became ill after only three months of the first grade, and since the debilitating lung ailment persisted, he never went back to school at all. He could scarcely read until he was 14, still has to depend on his wife to extricate him from his lawless spelling. N. C. Wyeth was delighted to have his son at home on the ground that “no great artist ever went to college.” Year after year, Andy’s talent grew, until the time came when the great illustrator himself was being introduced as “Andrew Wyeth’s father.” Today, Wyeth commands the highest prices* of any living U.S. artist, but he feels that he may some day repeat his father’s experience. His only pupil is his sensitive 16-year-old son Jamie, and Wyeth wonders whether the day may come when he will be introduced as “James Wyeth’s father.”

Toughness & Tenderness. “Be like a sponge,” N. C. Wyeth said. “Sop up every experience of life, and then don’t forget to wring yourself dry in expression.” What Wyeth has sopped up in his 45 years is the vast interior of a geographically limited world in which “every hill is a personal feeling.” If his paintings seem stark and spare, it is because he wants to “pull things down to simplicity.” He has an unerring sense of composition: anything that interferes with “the essence” of a picture is ruthlessly eliminated. He prefers winter over summer, because in winter the trees are naked and the earth more fully revealed. Even his colors are kept from distracting: they are evening hues that melt into the canvas.

One of the best-known paintings Wyeth ever did is Christina’s World, in which a crippled woman is shown dragging herself up a hillside to a house on top. Christina was the same Miss Olson (see color) that Wyeth painted four years later in 1952. It is a striking portrait in its own right, but the drama is in the subtle conflicts between toughness and tenderness, courage and decay, and in the years of suffering implied by every wrinkle in the flesh and every blemish on the wall. In The Mill, Wyeth tried to capture “the damp feeling, the strength of the land,” yet, in this silent scene, a feeling of conflict is still there as the earth struggles to wrench itself from the cold clutch of winter.

In other hands, Wyeth’s peeling walls, the desolate farms, the long passageways of decaying houses, the interiors seen in unusual perspective, could have become merely stagy. But in Wyeth the drama does not get out of hand, for even objects take on human emotion. He can paint a frozen drinking trough and make it seem as forlorn as an orphaned child. His battered barns brood about better days; a darkened window can show the same pain as the eyes of one of Wyeth’s Negroes. The world that Wyeth paints is old, weary, sad and scarred. It is not nostalgia for a simpler, more homespun America that he evokes, but an enormous sense of melancholy for all mankind.

* The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts recently paid $58,000 for Wyeth’s That Gentleman.