Adam

“In art as in lit­er­a­ture, ugli­ness ren­dered with com­pas­sion is beauty.”
—W. Joe Innis

This may be the 20^th cen­tury paint­ing I most admire. It’s “Adam,” an egg tem­pera paint­ing by Andrew Wyeth. It depicts Adam John­son, a poor farmer and a neigh­bor and friend of Wyeth’s. It was painted in 1963, the year I was born.

I think this is a great paint­ing because it projects a sense of com­pas­sion. You feel Adam’s hard life, and you feel a sense of con­nect­ed­ness to him. He’s a real per­son, a human being with his own life, his own human­ity, his own tragedy. You don’t know his story (although you can imag­ine a small part of it from the con­text), but there is a strong sense that there is one. Few paint­ings, even by great artists, man­age this.

When I used this as an exam­ple of a great paint­ing on an inter­net art forum awhile back, one poster didn’t get it. He said that the use of a poor black man in a paint­ing was just another banal stereo­type. The paint­ing was kitsch, not art. I dis­agree. Wyeth knew this man. He wasn’t paint­ing some sym­bol of under­class rural life, he was paint­ing Adam John­son, his friend.

I also think the com­po­si­tion is bril­liant. The for­mat is very wide, with Adam pre­sented in three-quarter front view just slightly off­set from cen­ter. The mid­dle ground objects, and the back­ground hills, curve down­ward to the right behind Adam, cre­at­ing a sense of dynamic move­ment jux­ta­posed against the sta­sis of the obese Adam stand­ing stolidly in the fore­ground with his eyes res­olutely shut. The eye is stopped at the right by the fence post and at the left by the han­dles of the tools lean­ing against the wall, keep­ing us within the scene (it’s not easy to do that in such a wide-format paint­ing). The sense of move­ment in the back­ground is enhanced by the flock of birds in flight, an effect that would seem exces­sively melo­dra­matic, but in the con­text of such a grounded pic­ture it gives a sense of strange­ness that speaks to another level of real­ity within world cre­ated by the painting.

It’s not a pretty pic­ture, but it’s a deeply humane one.