Wyeth's Home-Grown Surrealism
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art WYETH'S HOME-GROWN SURREALISM by VIVIEN RAYNOR At age 60, Andrew Wyeth is being transformed into a "misunderstood genius." Not content with merely displaying his unique brand of Americana...
...interiors often look like the scenes of horrible Gothic crimes...
...Not content with merely displaying his unique brand of Americana (through February 8), the Metropolitan Museum and its director, Thomas Moving, have gone into promotional work...
...And he continues: "I know I was getting pretty close to putting Christina in the position I wanted, the arms and everything, you know, where it showed the tragedy as well as the joyfulness of her life . . . but then one day, suddenly, I noticed my chair had been moved and I could see by the dust on the floor that something had dragged itself across the steps...
...introduced a flint-lock pistol into the first still-life assignments...
...This is born of a very striking, if theatrical, design plus the voyeuristic intensity with which he explores his subject matter...
...She looks irritable...
...A stag's head in the snow documents merely an out-of-season shot...
...I must admit that The Virgin (1969) surprised me...
...Another example of Wyeth's warmth is the story he tells about his famous painting of the late Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down and indomitable, dragging herself across a field (Christina's World...
...A quick-drying medium, tempera reportedly can be painted over almost indefinitely...
...She knew what I was doing all right and never said anything...
...Unfortunately, the result of the two men's efforts is merely Wyeth repackaged rather than illuminated...
...Since Kuerner is much less picturesque then either his wife or Christina Olson, his appeal for Wyeth must have been psychological...
...Most of them depict the two rural households, the Kuerners' and Olsons', that have so long exercised the artist's imagination...
...I refer to his far-from-compassionate preoccupation with death, deformity and crabbed age...
...Terrific...
...Knowing that the composition came about as Anna Kuerner inadvertently entered the room while her husband was being painted does not alleviate the unpleasantness of the scene...
...Childhood drawings show an interest in medieval romance, weaponry and armor...
...But pretty soon the old quality of unease made itself felt, though it took a while to locate the source...
...The sun streams in from the right, highlighting damp yellow hair and one shoulder and breast...
...The husband sits far left, bundled in a coat, his back to his shriveled, leprechaun-like wife...
...Carrying on at length to Hoving about Siri, the new model's name, Wyeth calls her a "symbol of rebirth" because he met her at the time of Christina Olson's funeral...
...A delicate child, he spent much time wandering with friends around the family's Chadds Ford estate, dressing up in the costumes his father had accumulated as reference material for his illustrations...
...To demonstrate her ideal blend of freshness, innocence and earthiness, he tells another of his cute anecdotes...
...A double portrait of the Kuerners has their profiles set stark and low against a white wall...
...What makes a Wyeth recognizable, and often unforgettable, is not the painstaking attention to detail...
...and there are altogether too many guns, hooks, antlers, and German helmets around...
...But his pictures reveal only a monarch fond of his pet dwarfs...
...Andrew, the second son of illustrator N. C. Wyeth, was tutored at home...
...But he never succeeded in inspiring his children with his own vigorous attitude toward painting: If the father waded into art, the children, on the whole, have approached it with lifted pinkies...
...Later, the "something" was to say that this was her favorite of all the pictures done of her...
...There is shomething dishonestly dirty about it...
...The watercolors and drawings are more dashing, yet they too are strangely without character...
...The artist, Hoving declares in an accompanying booklet that could without much difficulty be mistaken for Alt-man's fall catalogue, has been boxed into neat little preconceptions by both fans and detractors...
...The body of this exceptionally well-built 15-year-old faces front...
...Deservedly the most successful of a brush-wielding clan that includes in-laws and grandchildren, Andrew originally had some of his father's brio, but dissipated it in the fussiness that tempera encourages容specially in timid practitioners...
...To this end, the Met has assembled nearly 200 of Wyeth's paintings, drawings and watercolors...
...the rifle cradled in Kuerner's arms points directly at her...
...Compare his benignly contemptuous portrayals of the "peasants"葉he Kuerners and Olsons葉o the one of his son Nicholas bathed in a royal glow and dreaming, says the artist, "about airplanes...
...In any case, there is no pressing need to do this for Wyeth, who is virtually an institution despite his ambiguous position in American art...
...His art is, as has frequently been remarked, in the home-grown tradition of veristic surrealism...
...Indeed, for an old-fashioned exponent of humanism Wyeth shows inhuman用erhaps inhumane is the word葉raits that are quite contemporary...
...In fact, one is never too far here from Han Christian Andersen's world of wicked witches or Freud's landscape of sexual symbolism...
...her head is turned toward the sunlight...
...One searches vainly through the interview with Hoving to find some clue to the mystery of the lives the artist has studied so mercilessly, something that will make them more than Wyeth subjects...
...It was begun without her knowledge, he recalls, although he had set up a studio in her house...
...Ultimately, though, it is Wyeth's handling of life that proves most unnerving...
...For my part, I'm going to find an old Doris Day movie somewhere and unwind...
...To overcome the boy's resistance to formal art training, N.C...
...It seems he was painting Siri one day when she suddenly rushed into the garden and clubbed a vegetable-stealing ground hog to death...
...Hoving, who promises a detailed catalogue of this part of the oeuvre, has been assisted in his chosen task by the financing of Joseph P. Levine, one of the artist's most ardent collectors...
...Like Barbra Streisand, he satisfies the mass appetite for virtuosity (often confused with old-time craftsmanship) while rendering critical evaluation almost meaningless...
...In a well-known 1948 portrait he is seen under a meat hook set in a cracked ceiling...
...The time has come, therefore, for a clearheaded reevaluation...
...exclaims the artist, adding that the blood had "spattered a little on her legs...
...He insists on the warmth, sometimes wordless, of the relationships between him and his models...
...And even if one has come to terms with the museum's pursuit of cultural box-office, it is still painful to see the Met used as an arena for untangling critical logjams...
...It is not so much that the girl is posed naked in this dark shed, it is that the artist made the crotch his eye level...
...Wyeth pere, himself trained by Howard Pyle, was a rigorous teacher and apparently very confident that he was founding a dynasty...
...The floor was polished slightly...
...These people don't (or won't) notice that the artist easily holds his own in the kinki-ness department...
...Viewing the works in this show様ike the 1952 studies of torn curtains flapping at the windows of a dilapidated house熔ne becomes convinced that Wyeth's art is largely an extension of childhood fantasies...
...A veteran of World War I who served in the German Army, he seldom appears without compromising props such as aforementioned helmet and gun...
...Wyeth partisans admire his adherence to simple, decent country values in a world gone rotten with modernism...
...At first it looked simply like a crisp study of a standing girl about three-quarters life-size and shown against an academically brown background...
...This magic works on audiences suh-Hminally, or certainly at depths where there is too little oxygen to nourish objective analysis...
...I concluded that the artist was mellowing...
...it is the claustrophobic atmosphere...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 3
