One of the less appealing aspects of art scholarship and criticism in the past half-century has been the extent to which it has wasted its time defining art. To be sure, presented with the spectacle of a row of bricks or Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” or a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde, one might be prompted to ponder the nature of art. But as with Freud’s cigar, there are limits to such inductive reasoning in the realm of painting and sculpture, and we might find ourselves turning and returning to certain artists, and works of art, with relief.
In that sense, it is fair to say that no American artist of his time challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, or begged the what-is-art question, so consistently and so successfully as Andrew Wyeth. With his death last week at 91, a long, complicated, productive, and impressive career came to an end; the debate about his work, of course, will go on indefinitely.
In the marketplace of art and art journalism, Wyeth had two, perhaps three, liabilities. First, he was a representational artist in the high tide of abstract expressionism. A keen eye will discern certain patterns of abstraction in Wyeth’s painting, but that would distract the brain from seeing what Wyeth wished it to see. While the great names of mid-20th-century American painting descended ever deeper into conceptual visions, Wyeth remained resolutely “realistic,” in form and content.
Second, he was immensely popular–a sure sign of middlebrow distinction, and a serious, usually fatal, stigma in the art-critical world. This is not the same as commercial success, by the way; it is one thing to grow rich off the patronage of museums and collectors, quite another to appeal to the general, museum-going public.
To these crosses we may add a corollary or two. Not only was Wyeth representational, he was defiantly representational, and largely consistent in style, giving no quarter to the evolving schools of his lifetime–action painting, environmental earthworks, photo-realism, etc.–and deliberately divorcing himself from the mainstreams of academic art. His reclusiveness, in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and in Maine, was both personal and professional.
He was also, to the extent that such things matter in an artist, conservative in politics as well as temperament. The blessing of Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970 might have been a kind of kiss of death, so far as Wyeth’s standing in, say, Manhattan was concerned; but he did not shrink from the occasion, and presumably welcomed it. He famously voted for Ronald Reagan. His perspective on the land of his birth–as seen in his public pronouncements, as well as in some of his better-known pictures–was not ironic.
Of course, what is interesting about Wyeth is not his standing in the gallery world, or his politics, but his art; and what is particularly intriguing about Wyeth is his popular appeal in light of the subject–the tone, mood, perspective–of his paintings. For Wyeth–like his near-contemporary Edward Hopper or his early model Winslow Homer–is very far from a congenial illustrator, or comfortable laureate of national myths.
Wyeth’s world, as seen in his bleak, elliptical landscapes, or the wintry isolation and decay of his animate and inanimate subjects, is a misanthrope’s world: cold, desolate, barren, godforsaken, largely devoid of humor and warmth. His human subjects gaze off into the middle distance, or stare intently at some unknown spectacle. His animals are fondly rendered, and keenly observed, but equally remote, content and comfortable away from humans. His careful renderings of the low-slung hills and glistening creeks around his native Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, are sunlit, but frozen in time, gripped in a death-like chill.
His most famous painting–or put another way, the painting most favored by the public–is the iconic “Christina’s World” (1948), which like much of Wyeth’s work, may be seen two ways. It is, at first glance, an appealing vision of a woman, arrayed on the ground of a barren hillside, staring off toward an aging farmhouse set against a blank sky. Yet a mystery obtains: We don’t know why the woman is splayed on the grass, whether relaxing or crawling away on the ground. We cannot, in fact, see what she looks like, or know how old she is, or determine whether her “world” is the circumscribed space between her withered arms and the skeletal house.
As we know, of course, Christina Olson was a real neighbor of Wyeth’s in Maine, a crippled woman in her fifties who refused to use a wheelchair and subsisted, in considerable squalor, on her own fierce terms in the house on the crest of the hill. Wyeth admired Christina’s independence but, as he precisely depicts it, demonstrates how painful the sour remnants of her world must be.
Andrew Wyeth was a singular artist with a stark, compelling vision. Certainly it tells us something about ourselves, as Americans, that this painter of alienation, this severe, austere man who illustrated loneliness with such evident affection and attention to detail, should speak to something that we long to see.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
