Among the artistic Wyeth clan, the subject of a new exhibit at Portland Art Museum, Andrew Wyeth is the best known. He stands beside one of his paintings of Helga Testorf at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1987. (AP Photo/J Scott Applewhite, File)
By Richard Speer | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
First, three disclaimers about the new Wyeth show at Portland Art Museum. It isn't devoted solely to Andrew Wyeth. It doesn't include Wyeth's best-known masterpiece, "Christina's World," which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It doesn't include any of Wyeth's once-scandalous portraits of Helga Testorf, the sturdy blonde neighbor who posed for him, often nude, in more than 200 paintings and drawings.
What "The Wyeths: Three Generations of American Art" does offer is an epic-scale examination of an artistic dynasty, replete with enough family drama to fill a week's worth of soap operas. The show, culled from a collection owned by the Bank of America, highlights not only the paintings and sketches of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), but also of Andrew's father, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) and son Jamie Wyeth (born 1946), as well as Andrew's sister, Henriette Wyeth (1907-1997) and brother-in-law Peter Hurd (1904-1984). Art lovers familiar only with Andrew's work — with its sprawling fields of wheat, lonely farmhouses and enigmatic figures — will find the show a welcome opportunity to get acquainted with the iconic painter's progenitor and progeny.
6 essential paintings in 'The Wyeths' at Portland Art Museum
N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), Gnomes Bowling, 1921, oil on canvas, Bank of America Collection
When Andrew Wyeth was born 100 years ago, no one could have guessed that he would someday eclipse his father’s fame. Although not well-remembered by the lay public today, N.C. Wyeth was one of the world’s preeminent illustrators. His drawings and paintings were reproduced in children’s books and classic adventure stories like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.”
These illustrations, many of which are among the 74 artworks in the Portland exhibition, crackle with a boldly theatrical sense of motion and physicality: the wind-whipped cape in “Winter (Death)” (1909), the lightning bolt striking bowling pins in “Gnomes Bowling” (1921), the soldier carrying a wounded comrade in “Marines Landing on the Beach” (1944).
N.C. knew how to draw the body because he’d grown up on the family farm in Massachusetts, doing hard physical chores and watching other people move. In his best works you can feel the torque of muscles straining, the grit and sweat of effort. His tableaux of heroic deeds and faraway lands made him a highly sought-after illustrator and a wealthy man.
N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), Marines Landing on the Beach, 1944, oil on hardboard, Bank of America Collection
But N.C. wanted something money couldn’t buy. He wanted out of the ghetto of illustration and into the pantheon of fine art. “He had terrible misgivings about his work,” his grandson Jamie told art historian Henry Adams. “He thought illustration was not a true art form, and when he decided to be a painter, he could not quite pull it off.”
Indeed, N.C.’s “Untitled Landscape” (1923) reads like watered-down Impressionism. His paintings of fishermen in the 1930s suffer from an inertia far removed from the dynamism of his illustrations. As time went on and art-world acceptance never arrived, N.C. grew depressed, his weight ballooned, and he died tragically: His car stalled on a railroad track as a freight train approached, killing him and his 4-year-old grandson. Some speculated his death was a suicide.
Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Crossed Swords, 1992, watercolor on paper, Bank of America Collection
Before his decline, N.C. had tutored his son Andrew in the intricacies of drawing and painting. He was a tough teacher, stern and controlling, but Andrew had the aptitude to take the proverbial ball and run with it. As Andrew matured as an artist, it became clear that his pictures were very different from his father’s: quieter, more stoic, their sense of drama less overt. The narratives they weave unfurl more in the viewer’s mind than on the canvas.
Andrew used a different medium, too. Unmoved by oil paint, in 1936 he started using egg tempera, often using a technique called drybrush. It lent a spartan, ghostly surface to his depictions of rural life in Maine and Pennsylvania.
There is something unsettling, even chilling, in much of Andrew’s work. While it’s easy to take a painting like “River Valley” (1966) as a celebration of the American landscape, the painter never dips you in honeyed light and halcyon nostalgia the way, say, Norman Rockwell does. Wyeth always holds something back. Something sinister, we infer, lurks inside those prim farmhouse doors. As portrayals of rural and small-town American life, these are more the province of David Lynch than Steven Spielberg.
Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Victoria, 1999, watercolor on paper, Bank of America Collection
“There is a darkness to them,” says Brian Ferriso, Portland Art Museum’s director and the exhibition’s curator. “There is a lack of nostalgia. Wyeth is really reflecting the complexity of human life: not only our hopes, but also our fears and our ambivalence about the passing of time and death.”
Although Andrew made his New York gallery debut when he was only 20 (every painting in the show sold), and although “Christina’s World” (1948) stands among the most famous paintings ever made by an American artist, Andrew had something of his father’s chip on the shoulder when it came to art-world approbation. He was the nation’s leading realist in the era of abstraction. And while the hoi polloi loved his paintings, important critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg weren’t interested in his wheat-cracked idylls.
Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009), Antler Crown, 1983, tempera on panel, Bank of America Collection
Wyeth's mid-20th-century works also shared scant common ground with Pop art's consumerist critique, the high-minded theories of minimalism, conceptual art or Neo-expressionism. The tug-of-war between idealism and cynicism so central to the movements and countermovements in modern and contemporary art was light-years away from Andrew's studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Critics either yawned or dismissed his imagery as "boring ... dead and dry" (Peter Schjeldahl) or "bleak portraits of a barren country" (Michael Kimmelman). He kept painting until his death in 2009 at 91.
Jamie Wyeth (American, born 1946), Number 86, 1980, watercolor and mixed media on paper, Bank of America Collection
Andrew’s son Jamie knew better than to try to beat his father at his own game. While he inherited Andrew’s uncanny facility with draftsmanship, he deployed it in directions more attuned to contemporary art’s concerns. Unlike his father’s predominantly humorless paintings, Jamie’s wink with an impish irony. You see it in the wild-haired figure in “Lighthouse” (1993), the deadpan stares of cows and dogs in his animal portraits, and the pumpkin-headed figures he returns to through the decades. You sense he’s in on the joke and is having good fun.
Jamie doesn’t limit himself to whimsy, though. His portrait of John F. Kennedy (painted four years after Kennedy’s assassination) and his many portraits of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev exude a nobility that verges on hero worship. These images seem more in the lineage of John Singer Sargent than of N.C. or Andrew Wyeth.
The Portland show affords an opportunity to see grandfather, son and grandson in physical proximity and to compare and contrast their styles. Are there common threads? Ferriso thinks so. “All of them share a rigorous formal training in drawing; they all have an incredible ability to bend and push paint and to understand color and tone.”
Jamie Wyeth (American, born 1946), Pumpkinhead Visits the Lighthouse, 2000, mixed media on toned board, Bank of America Collection
In 2017, the art-world schisms between illustration and fine art that haunted N.C. seem downright quaint. It's somehow apropos that George Lucas is an ardent collector of both N.C. Wyeth and another long-contested illustrator, Norman Rockwell, and that their paintings will hang together when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles several years from now. The leveling of pop and high culture in the age of mass media has given us a fresh perspective on the Wyeths' work. To walk through the exhibition galleries — which are painted taupe and appointed with wainscoting to evoke New England and rural Pennsylvania — is to walk through a trajectory not only of artistic styles, but also of time, changing mores and the ever-mutating notion of what constitutes an American life.
"The Wyeths: Three Generations -- Works from the Bank of America Collection"
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday and Saturday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, Oct. 7-Jan. 28 (except Thanksgiving and Christmas)
Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave.
Tickets: $20 adults, $17 college students and seniors ages 62 and older, free for children 17 and younger; portlandartmuseum.org or 503-226-2811
Special event: Victoria Browning Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's granddaughter, will give a lecture titled "The Life and Works of Andrew Wyeth" at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7. Sold out; watch a live stream on the Portland Art Museum's Facebook page.
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