This article fist appeared in th St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 19, 2009 - When I heard of the painter Andrew Wyeth's death last week, I was astonished that so many years had passed since I'd thought about him or his family or his work.
The Wyeths occupy a place of some celebrity in the history of 20th century American art. His father was the formidable N.C. Wyeth, whose illustrations are justifiably famous and memorable. Andrew Wyeth's son, Jamie, also a painter, had his few months of fame when he and Andy Warhol painted portraits of one another in 1976.
Andrew Newell Wyeth had achieved the venerable age of 91 when he died Friday (Jan. 16) at home in Chadds Ford, Pa., where he was born in 1917. He was an assiduous observer of the Brandywine River Valley, where Chadds Ford is located, as he was of the coastal Maine, where he and his family spent a considerable amount of time every year.
My wonder about having put thoughts of Wyeth out of mind for so long interests me because at one time invoking his name was enough to create a dust-up of one sort or another in the company I kept in my student days of the 1960s.
In the mid 20th century, we spent a lot of time debating the relative value of this painter and that one, and Mr. Wyeth was considered an apostate. For some, it was not enough to dismiss him as hopelessly out of step with the times; he deserved ridicule. Some critics were all to ready to oblige. Hilton Kramer, for example, in his pre-neoconservative aesthetic Pooh-Bah incarnation, said flatly Wyeth couldn't paint. Other critics described the work as kitschy or sentimental or both.
But he was popular, wildly popular, perhaps because his houses were houses, his trees were trees and his disabled Christina Olson was clearly a miserable woman crawling though a field toward her weather-beaten dwelling. His depictions of Helga, which caused a celebrity-magazine commotion in the 1980s, are fastidious representations of an enigmatic woman.
His popularity and the sales that accompanied it, and the exhibitions given it, raised the hackles of serious modernists. I considered myself one of them back then, and consider myself one now. But envy or aesthetic snobbishness or devotion to modernist attitudes or even connoisseurship aren't enough to explain the entire anti-Wyeth ruckus.
Certain anti-representationalist attitudes obtained in those days, and I didn't share them altogether. I found much to appreciate in the work of such artists as Fairfield Porter, and had and have respect for masters of mythology such as Norman Rockwell. Although I would never relegate Mr. Wyeth's work to the outer darkness populated by artists such as LeRoy Neiman and Thomas Kinkade, I would never elevate it to the status of Edward Hopper or even of Charles Burchfield.
By thinking through my feelings about Mr. Wyeth by writing this, I have figured out why I haven't given his art a thought in 25 or 30 years or more. Wyeth's work -- "Christina's World," the Olson Farm, Helga - is cause for reminiscence but not for serious reflection.
What I objected to in my youth - and now - is that Mr. Wyeth's work was facile rather than penetrating, that although he had rejected, to some degree, the fundamental illustrative qualities of his father's swash-and-buckle aesthetic, Mr. Wyeth couldn't transcend technical facility for something much more important: an inspired intelligence that brings intensity to art and produces the tremulous low notes that affect the viewer viscerally. Instead, there was an astringency to his work, a pinched, WASPy, Down-East reserve that often disguises emotional shallowness.
We have understood, from Plato's observations on, that while verisimilitude may be TO the point in the creation of a work of art it is not THE point. That is, accurate representations of the "real" may contribute to the quality of a picture or a sculpture, but such representations in no way define art in its most abundant and compelling meanings.
I understand what John Donne had to say about the meaning of the tolling of the bell, and try to subscribe with sympathy to the notion that no person is entire of the main. Thus, I salute Mr. Wyeth for a life productively spent and for putting his piece of the jigsaw puzzle of American Art in place. The piece, however, fits into the whole easily. It makes a contribution, but not a revelation. In the last analysis, it is of no consequence to me, and to consider art or anything else fundamentally inconsequential is the most condemnatory judgment of all.