Email
PrintJudging Wyeth
For more than 70 years, his work has pleased regular folks and divided critics.
(page 1 of 3)
Andrew Wyeth was not like you and me. When we were young and thought life would go on forever, we squandered our time on videogames or cartoons. Wyeth painted. When we realized that our names were also on death’s list, we wallowed in pick-your-decade nostalgia. Wyeth painted. When we got bored with the spouse, we … Well, hopefully, we did nothing. But Wyeth convinced Helga Testorf to get naked. And then he painted.
On the anti-Wyeth side is an entrenched corps of critics like Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker who, in 1987, famously wrote: “Wyeth isn’t exactly a painter. He is a gifted illustrator for reproduction, which improves his dull originals.”
He also called Wyeth “a regional reproof to all aspects of urbanity.” Regional—which is to say, “minor, not world-class; OK for fooling the rubes.”
Wyeth heard this sort of talk for much of his life. Success provided partial compensation, but the artist admitted that negative criticism still hurt. It “really knocks you flat,” he told one writer, “like a stiff haymaker to the midsection.”
One critic, Brian O’Doherty, thinks the disagreements about Wyeth may be a city/country thing. Wyeth paints rural scenes with an emphasis on its loneliness that people in crowded cities—or even suburbs—often just don’t get and, therefore, confuse with nostalgia.
“I think he is grievously misjudged by city people,” said O’Doherty. “What people see in Wyeth is sentiment, but country sentiment is a cover for all kinds of brutalities.”
Born in Chadds Ford in 1917, Wyeth grew up in a family of artists. His father, Newell Convers “N.C.” Wyeth, was a magazine and book illustrator who first came to the region at the turn of the 20th century to study with Howard Pyle. Pyle, a native of Wilmington, ran a free, invitation-only school in an old mill near Brandywine Battlefield for the most talented students in his art classes at Drexel Institute. The senior Wyeth liked the Brandywine Valley so much that, after achieving his first successes, he returned, bought land and built a house.
According to biographer David Michaelis, N.C. Wyeth had a difficult childhood and, perhaps for that reason, was determined to create an idyllic world for his own children. He guided daughter Ann’s career as a composer, and taught Henriette, Caroline and Andrew to paint. (He was Andrew’s only teacher.) N.C. taught his children—as Pyle had taught him—that the only way to paint something was to experience it. And so the Wyeth children began their artistic educations with endless romps through the woods, often dressed in the period costumes in which their father dressed his models. In addition to providing disciplined artistic training, N.C. wanted to free his children’s imaginations and sharpen their powers of observation.
