Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth died a few days ago, in his sleep at his home in Chadd’s Ford, Penn­syl­va­nia. He was 91.

By coin­ci­dence, just a cou­ple of weeks ago I had din­ner with a friend in Mor­tonville, Penn­syl­va­nia, about 15 miles from Chadd’s Ford. So I’ve been think­ing about Wyeth the last few days.

Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say in its obit­u­ary:

Wyeth gave Amer­ica a prim and flinty view of Puri­tan rec­ti­tude, starchily sen­ti­men­tal, through parched gray and brown pic­tures of spooky frame houses, des­ic­cated fields, deserted beaches, cir­cling buz­zards and craggy-faced New Eng­lan­ders. A vir­tual Rorschach test for Amer­i­can cul­ture dur­ing the bet­ter part of the last cen­tury, Wyeth split pub­lic opin­ion as vig­or­ously as, and prob­a­bly even more so than, any other Amer­i­can painter includ­ing the other mod­ern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

All of what the main­stream press has to say about him is pretty much mean­ing­less. The obit­u­ar­ies relate mostly to the busi­ness of build­ing Wyeth’s pub­lic per­sona, a con­struc­tion that cre­ated mass audi­ences and even­tual sales of well over a $1 mil­lion for each major paint­ing. That was good for Wyeth inso­far as it made him and his fam­ily very rich and pushed his work into the pub­lic eye, where it could be exco­ri­ated by crit­ics who had no abil­ity to com­pre­hend it.

As far as I’m con­cerned, Wyeth was the eas­ily the most impor­tant artist of the 20^th cen­tury. In part that’s because of his tow­er­ing skill: his abil­i­ties with regard to tech­nique, form, com­po­si­tion, and ren­der­ing were com­pa­ra­ble to the finest artists in his­tory. But that is of course only part of the story, as many past artists with supe­rior tech­ni­cal skills but the absence of great­ness have demon­strated. Beyond his tech­ni­cal skill was his abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate his com­plete immer­sion in what he chose to paint. Crit­ics liked to com­plain about his sen­ti­men­tal, dreary sub­ject mat­ter, his “fecal” palette, his obses­sion with detail, the repet­i­tive nature of his work (as if what they liked was any less repet­i­tive), his unapolo­getic ded­i­ca­tion to an Amer­i­can visual tra­di­tion, and (most impor­tant in the mod­ern art world) the com­plete absence of irony in his work.

None of that mat­ters. Wyeth was utterly in love the places and peo­ple of a few small parts of Penn­syl­va­nia and Maine, and he knew how to con­vey that love. He wasn’t inter­ested in work­ing with any other sub­ject mat­ter, in any other way than what felt right to him, no mat­ter what the crit­ics or any­one else said. That kind of love, with the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate it, is what all good paint­ing is about.

A few quotes:

“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”

“I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the stu­dio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it dri­ves me mad.”

“God, I’ve frozen my ass off paint­ing snow scenes!”

God­speed, Andrew.