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<text>
<title>
(1960s) Andy's World:Andrew Wyeth
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1960s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
December 27, 1963
Andy's World
</hdr>
<body>
<p> It was a natural question; under the circumstances, anybody
would have asked it. Harvard's President Nathan Pusey, chatting
with Painter Andrew Wyeth at dinner the night before giving him
an honorary doctor of fine arts degree in 1955, inquired: "And
where did you go to college?" Wyeth knew that his answer might
well be dumbfounding to a professional protagonist of formal
learning, but he went ahead and said it: "I didn't go to
college. I never even went to school." Recalling Pusey's
expression now, Wyeth says: "He almost fainted."
</p>
<p> Of course, Wyeth did get an education: in academic matters
from tutors, in art from his late renowned father N.C. Wyeth.
But if in the scholarly sense he never went to school, in the
artistic sense he is his own school.
</p>
<p> Andrew Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pa. (pop. 140), and Cushing,
Me. (pop. 130), stands high and apart from the mainstream of
American art. Manhattan-centered abstract expressionism has in
the past two decades given a multitude of new answers to the
central questions: What is painting? What is art? What is form?
Wyeth is no heroic rearguard defender against that trend. But,
in a tradition going back to the roots of art, he insists on
exploring something else: the condition of nature and the depth
of the human spirit.
</p>
<p> He paints landscapes and houses, the outside and inside of
the world where man lives. Across these carefully recorded
scenes, he shows the track, the flicker, the expression of life,
even if the living object has long since departed--the print
of a heron on the sand, the feeling that a crow flew by, the sea
shells lined up in an empty room on a woman's whim. Millions are
touched in their sense of morality, and they count Andrew Wyeth
an incomparable painter.
</p>
<p> His temperas are in major American museums, from
Manhattan's Met and Modern to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
(Others that have temperas: Milwaukee Art Center; Wilmington
(Del.) Society of the Fine Arts; Addison Gallery of American Art
in Andover, Mass.; Toledo Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of
Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia;
William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me.;
Shelburne (Vt.) Museum; New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American
Art; Wadsworth Antheneum in Hartford, Conn.; and Currier
Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H.) His shows are thronged:
247,800 people went to a month-long Wyeth show in Buffalo last
year. Last summer, when President Kennedy picked a painting to
be among the first winners of the Medal of Freedom--the U.S.'s
highest civilian honor--it was quite inevitable that the
choice would be Wyeth. A fortnight ago, President Johnson
presented it to him with a citation declaring that "he has in
the great humanist tradition illuminated and clarified the
verities" of life.
</p>
<p> Youthful Spirit. The one most revealing fact about Andrew
Wyeth is his age: 46. His painting may treat of age-old wisdom;
his life speaks of free-spirited youth. He has a classic car,
a Mark II Lincoln Continental, drives it with abandon. He
drinks endless mugfuls of heady, homemade hard cider. He loves
clowning: one Halloween he festooned his tall gaunt frame with
animal hair stuck on with flour paste, and roamed Chadds Ford
like a bundle of Hydes. When he dresses up for company, he dons
a black Amish-elder's jacket that makes him look like Nehru in
mourning.
</p>
<p> "I am an outdoors painter," he says, and he spends most
of his days outside. When he comes home, it is to a 200-year-
old fieldstone house, newly remodeled so meticulously in
Pennsylvania colonial style that when he first saw it all
reconditioned he cracked, "Where do I register?" He has a
handsome brunette wife named Betsy, and a pair of youthful,
energetic sons.
</p>
<p> There is plenty of money to go with all this: the prices
that museums pay Wyeth regularly break records, and what he
gets from the 60-odd private collectors who have his temperas
has occasionally topped the museum prices. He may be the world's
best-paid painter after Picasso--and part of the reason is
Betsy. Once, 20 years ago, when he did a cover for the Saturday
Evening Post for $1,000 and seemed tempted to take a contract
with the magazine, she threatened to leave him. "It'll be the
end of your painting," she said. Recently, at the suggestion
of his dealer, M. Knoedler & Co., she incorporated him as The
Mill, Inc., and The Mill pays Wyeth a salary.
</p>
<p> A Dignified Recluse. But money does not preoccupy Andrew
Wyeth, and his whimsies are mostly a cover-up for what
engrosses him, the subjects of his work. The most famous of
these is a woman named Christina Olson. He has painted eight
temperas of her or her house, a decrepit three-story clapboard
pile atop a knoll near the Maine seacoast. One of them,
Christina's World, now 15 years old, is one of the most durable
and disquieting images of 20th century America. Against the wall
of landscape that leads up to her house, the crippled body of
an ageless woman seems trapped imprisoned by the very emptiness
of the earth. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which hesitated
before buying it in 1948 for $2,200, has repaid its investment
22 times over in the sale of reproductions.
</p>
<p> Christina, who is crippled by polio, is one of Wyeth's few
close friends. He judges people by their reactions to her. "I
don't take some people to see her," says Wyeth, "because they
won't understand." He fears that they will find her grotesque.
Christina's house contains the anonymous leavings of years of
confinement. The smell of burning oil, charred wood, fat cats
and old cloth fills the air. Christina, now nearing 70, does not
let anyone see how she moves about, stubbornly refuses to use
a wheelchair. "Andy's a very good friend," she says. "I like to
pose for him. He talks a great deal when he paints, but doesn't
talk nonsense." She does not talk nonsense either. Despite her
painful loneliness, she is dignified, proud and intelligent.
</p>
<p> None of Wyeth's portraits of Christina look alike; the
artist injects his own humanity into the people and places
around him. More than anything else that Wyeth paints,
Christina's individuality and inner strength are a mirror-
portrait of the artist himself. She is a touchstone of his
compassion.
</p>
<p> "Eloise, Ocean Breeze!" What Wyeth will paint next is what
currently worries him most. But winter is the season that best
inspires him, and he is full in the process of making the
watercolors that are the harbingers of his temperas. He bundles
up in boots, a turtleneck, a ratty forest-green hacking jacket
with a ragged velvet collar, and a shaggy sheepskin coat. He
grabs his watercolor kit, clucks at his dogs to follow, and
lopes off across the snow-spotted fields. When he finds what he
wants, he plunks right down in the slush and goes to work with
a fury, often until his fingers turn blue.
</p>
<p> "He looks like he's in a battle," says Painter Peter Hurd,
his brother-in-law. "He stabs at the work as if with a
stiletto, dabbing with a bit of Kleenex, slashing with a razor
blade." The watercolors materialize by the hundreds, spattery
with a bravura immediacy.
</p>
<p> While Wyeth works, his favorite dog Eloise, a miniature
black poodle with a just-so Continental clip, digs holes and
sprays both the artist and his watercolors with dirt. When
Eloise thinks its time to get out of the cold, she trots up to
Wyeth's watercolor pan and tips it over with her nose. The
artist nuzzles into her curly fur, murmuring a ritual
incantation, "Eloise, ocean breeze!" Then he comes home with her
and Rattler, the gold hound depicted in Distant Thunder.
</p>
<p> In the Studio. For the long, hard work of painting an egg
tempera, a technique that has not been in common practice since
the quattrocentro, Wyeth will retreat to his studio near the old
family home where he was brought up. He hates to be watched in
his studio--except by dogs and kids. The William A. Farnsworth
Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me., has recently bought an
essay by Troy Kaichen, a literate Cushing boy, who knows Wyeth
well. It describes Wyeth at work.
</p>
<p> "The studio of Andrew Wyeth the Painter contains nothing
else but what he's working on." wrote Troy. "In the center of
the room sits Mr. Wyeth with a large easel in front of him.
Every once in a while Mr. Wyeth gets up and walks to a mirror
hanging on the wall. The first time he did this I asked him why.
He answered, `For some reason you can see the picture more
clearly in the mirror than you can just looking at it.' Mr.
Wyeth stepped aside and I looked into the mirror myself. Sure
enough the picture was much brighter and clearer.
</p>
<p> "Mr. Wyeth went back to his painting. He had run out of an
important color; so he took two tubes, squeezed some paint from
each of them and then he poured some yellow liquid into the
whole mess. Wondering, I asked him what the yellow stuff was.
`That's egg yolk,' he replied. `Have you ever noticed that if
you drop an egg and don't clean it up immediately it sticks and
you can't get it off? It does the same thing in pictures. Also
if you use yolk the picture will not fade like ordinary
watercolors.' `Doesn't it affect the color of the paint?' I
asked. `No,' he said, `surprisingly enough it doesn't affect the
color at all.'
</p>
<p> "Leaning on the walls and lying all over shelves are
sketches that Mr. Wyeth has made. He has sketches in color which
make small pieces of the picture. When he sits down to work on
the painting he has to fit the pieces together in his mind. The
hardest part is just going on and on and on to finish the job
after you're over the excitement of suddenly knowing what you
want to do and the fast sketches.
</p>
<p> "Like anyone else returning from work Mr. Wyeth changes out
of his old paint-spattered pants when he gets in the house. When
he returns from the studio he always has paint on himself too.
One place is really very noticeable--a long streak on his
lower lip. That comes from wiping the extra paint off his brush;
since his lip is handy, he makes use of it."
</p>
<p> A Dynasty of Art. The name Wyeth is familiar to almost
every kid who ever had a library card, because it belongs to the
most ambitious American art dynasty since the 18th century
Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale named his children
Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphaelle and Titian and brought two of them
up to join a raft of relatives in the family trade. The Wyeth
dynasty was founded when Newell Converse Wyeth went in 1903 from
Massachusetts to Wilmington, Del., to study painting with the
scholarly illustrator Howard Pyle. Often Pyle and his favorite
pupil would journey the twelve miles out of Wilmington to Chadds
Ford to paint along the banks of the Brandywine near the old
gristmill. Within three years, N.C. had married, and soon after
put down roots on the Pennsylvania hills.
</p>
<p> N.C.'s artistic style set the style for his family. Ruddy,
with the outdoorsy zest of his Welsh ancestors, he painted
robust men of action whose thighs and biceps strained the seams
of some of the best-executed costumes in all book illustration.
Generations of children know the gnarled tree trunks of Sherwood
Forest from his illustrations for Robin Hood, or Blind Pew
frantically tapping down the road after his cowardly companions
in Treasure Island. Although N.C. wished to be remembered as a
muralist, his best-known works bear such romantic titles as "One
more step, Mr. Israel Hands, and I'll blow your brains out."
</p>
<p> Method Painting. Last of his father's five children, Andrew
Wyeth was born into a virtual factory of fantasy. N.C. spouted
Shakespeare as he dosed his children with castor oil, encouraged
them to set up toy theaters all over the house, and persuaded
them well up into their teens that Santa Claus did indeed exist.
But his greatest gift was teaching his brood how to re-create
drama, and a little art colony sprang up by the Brandywine.
</p>
<p> "Never paint the material of the sleeve," N.C. would roar.
"Become the arm!" It was classical instruction, demanding
empathy with the object. Yet the leonine old illustrator never
let his pupils fall for the pathetic fallacy--that empty
barrels are lonely. He believed that the painting must find an
echo inside the painter--in a sense, Method painting. It was
all done with such verve and warmth that, as Sister Carolyn
says, "there was nothing arty about it. It was like coasting,
like playing outside in the snow."
</p>
<p> The White Company. Quite naturally, the dynasty flourished.
The eldest, Henriette, a painter in her own right, is married
to Painter Hurd. Most eccentric of the children is Carolyn, now
54, who gallivants about in a flat black gaucho hat, paints and
teaches art classes. Sister Ann, 48, turned to music, but
married one of N.C.'s students, John McCoy, and stayed on in
Chadds Ford. Brother Nathaniel, 52, "drew neat little pictures
inside little squares," married a niece of Howard Pyle, and
quite naturally became a creative engineer in research for Du
Pont in nearby Wilmington.
</p>
<p> As the bouncy benjamin of N.C.'s children, Andy enjoyed
a special freedom from responsibility. Two weeks in the first
grade of the Chadds Ford school made Andy "nervous," so his
father generously took him out and supplied a tutor until he was
16. He grew up like Peter Pan, a prisoner of fantasy. "As a
kid," he says, "I adored Robin Hood, D'Artagnan, and"--he adds
innocently--"Dracula." N.C. designed an immense castle, which
his eldest son, Nat, built for the children's playroom. Andy
became its lord and staged jousts within its battlements.
</p>
<p> He hoarded the kind of toy soldiers that struck extravagant
poses, and left those that stood stiffly at attention to the
other children. At the age of nine, Andy did a book of
watercolors, full of musketeers and damsels in distress, and
romantically titled The Clang of Steel. When he was twelve, Andy
staged a memorable performance, Lilliputian-style in a theater
that he made himself, of the battle in The White Company, the
Arthur Conan Doyle drama of a staunch medieval company of
soldiers, which N.C. has illustrated. The old playroom castle
still sits in Andy's studio, and the toy soldiers are billeted
in a light box on his bedroom. "I've always loved miniature
things," he says. "Maybe that's why I turned to the fine
technique of tempera."
</p>
<p> Andy spent at least two years half believing that he was
Robin Hood. In a green hat and a phony blonde beard, he romped
the woods with Little John, a Negro playmate named David ("Doo-
Doo") Lawrence, and a band of merry youngsters. Sometimes they
would swoop down on a wealthy noble, such as the grocery boy,
and back in the forest they would picnic on robbed riches.
Another childhood chum was Vincent T. ("Skootch") Talley, who,
before he died this month, recalled that Andy's greatest thrill
was a mock reenactment of the battle of Brandywine. "We had one
thing in common," said Skootch. "We never grew up."
</p>
<p> "My Father, of Course." The Wyeths always summered in
Maine, and there, on his 22nd birthday, Andy met his future
wife, who was then only 17. The next year, while he continued
to study and paint with his father, they were married. When the
war years came, he tried to enlist, but was decisively 4-F'ed
because of crooked hip joints, which give him a gangly gait.
Instead, at a time when U.S. art was at a virtual standstill,
he churned out vigorous, splashy watercolors that explored
flattened space, joyous color and jumpy line in such a way that
they could have marked him as a nascent abstract expressionist.
</p>
<p> The idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C, was
killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford.
Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in
the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of
fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after
N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his
neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's
head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from
the ceiling. Say's Wyeth: "It was really a portrait of my
father, of course."
</p>
<p> Five years after his father's death, when Wyeth was 33,
some bloodstains on his pillow led him to the discovery that he
was suffering from bronchiectasis, a disease of the bronchial
tubes of one lung. They were removed in an operation so drastic
that his chest had to be opened from top to bottom, slashing his
shoulder muscles so that he thought he might never be able to
paint again. While convalescing, he painted The Trodden Weed,
with his arm suspended in a sling from the ceiling. The boots
that flatten the weed once belonged to Howard Pyle and were
Betsy's Christmas gift to him in 1950. Wyeth wore them while
taking long walks to regain his strength. He explained: "The
painting came to signify to me a close relationship between
critical illness and the refusal to accept it--a kind of
stalking away."
</p>
<p> Both his shoulder muscles and his health knitted back
together, although he still cannot get life insurance. Since
then, Wyeth, along with finishing two or three temperas a year,
has set himself to continuing the dynasty. His eldest son,
Nicky, 20, is a freshman at Delaware's Wesley Junior College and
plans to go into art dealing. Afternoons, Wyeth teaches the
family trade to his other son, Jaime, 17. So fast has Jaime
learned painting that the proceeds from his work sit in front
of the staid Wyeth house like a visitor from Mars--a red-hot
Corvette Sting Ray. Says Wyeth, "Some day I'll be known as James
Wyeth's father."
</p>
<p> The taste with which the Wyeths live is as high as the
taste of their art. Says a family friend: ""Their house, the
way the table is set, even the food they eat are all done with
a lack of pretense, a genuineness, a judgment that is a
delight. Between the pictures and their lives, there is no
break." On Thanksgiving, the clan gathers until there are often
20 at table. Betsy cooks up a storm straight out of the Gourmet
Cookbook, and--though she might still chill them--there are
vintage French burgundies to add some thunder. A frequent
visitor over the years is Brother-in-Law Hurd, a New Mexico
painter of Western landscapes, who years ago taught Wyeth how
to paint with tempera. Together, though, they are more apt to
top each other's tall tales than talk art.
</p>
<p> Where Now, Brown Cow. Wyeth knows that his work is
sometimes admired by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
"Ooooo!" he mocks, "Mr. Wyeth, such a bee-o-o-oootiful cow!"
Says he: "I'm a pure abstractionist in my thought. I'm no more
like a realist, such as Easkins or Copley, than I'm the man in
the moon." Wyeth is neither a slave to the faithful detailing
of nature, as were Courbet and Manet, nor a scientific observer
of light and atmosphere, as were the impressionists. "I want
more than half the story," he says. "There are some people who
like my work because they see every blade of grass. They're
seeing only one side of it. They don't see the tone. If you can
combine realism and abstraction, you've got something terrific."
</p>
<p> Wyeth frequently does. He "pulls things down to
simplicity," excluding from his work the superfluous and the
sentimental. He is an expressionist, selecting from his
subjective feeling only what is necessary to the painting. In
his Brown Swiss, a skyless 1957 landscape titled for the breed
of cows crossing it, Wyeth blithely eliminated the cows.
Instead, he showed narrow cow paths like the creases of a
worried century across the brown brow of a hillside. Nowadays,
he feels that he could even have removed Christina from
Christina's World and still have conveyed the same sense of
loneliness.
</p>
<p> The Ever-Subtler Second. From the depiction of high drama
as his father taught it, Wyeth has narrowed down to the moments
when life is charged with change, swapping N.C.'s clash of
cutlasses for his own clap of distant thunder. Sometimes it is
only the tragic twinkle of quaker ladies, blossoming while he
watches and fading in the frosty dew of early spring.
Disciplining the romantic inside him, he has sought the ever-
subtler second when existence is galvanized by the unexpected.
</p>
<p> "It's got to give me goose pimples," he says. His flesh
crawls at off moments. In Wind from the Sea Wyeth opens an
upstairs window in Christina Olson's house in a room that has
been closed for years, and the billowing of lace curtains lets
in a sudden puff of salty air. Wyeth is moved. Abruptly
glimpsing his own reflection in a dusty mirror leads to an
unexpected 1949 self-portrait, The Revenant, where he stands
perplexed and unbalanced in an abandoned room. The amber glass
ball on a lightning rod in Northern Point looks to him "as if
it were spinning in mid-air." And after four days of straddling
the roof top and examining it with his feverish watercolor
brush, Wyeth slowly turned to recapture in tempera that first
instant of surprise.
</p>
<p> Scratches at the Mask. Wyeth paints a timeless natural
world, probing past the facades of nature, where some people
only see picnic sites, to a further reality behind. He has
sketched countless pencil studies of tiny seed pods as fragilely
faceted as snowflakes, made exquisite dry-brush watercolors
(Dry-brush, used by Wyeth's mentor of the miniature, Albrecht
Durer, as early as 1450, is more like drawing then watercoloring
in technique. The artist works over still wet washes of water-
soluble pigment with a brush dipped in concentrated color and
squeezed almost dry. The stiff brushes, flattened and frayed
looking, add textures of weight and depth. "I use it for the
grass on a hill, for example, or the bark of a tree," says
Wyeth.) of bees' honeycombs in winter. Thus he scratches at the
mask of nature, attempts by imitation to expose her identity.
For Wyeth well knows now one poignant tragedy of man: that he
can never know all his world before it vanishes from his sight.
</p>
<p> This line of investigation makes his New York
contemporaries view Wyeth as a country cousin. To Larry Rivers,
"He's like someone who writes marvelous sonnets, but I don't
read sonnets much." To Jack Levine, he is "a symbol of real,
real bedrock Americanismo." Painter Robert Motherwell, formerly
an art historian, says: "I would imagine that an impressionist
would have looked at the pre-Raphaelites with astonishment, and
I feel a parallel astonishment regarding the works of Wyeth."
But they all look carefully at what Wyeth does, and agree that
there is something uncanny, macabre and mysterious about it.
</p>
<p> "Who?" To some, a man who bothers to paint a blade of grass
is an anachronism who must have been born in the previous
century. The late Bernard Berenson, going on guesswork, believed
that Wyeth was dead ("What a pity America has starved its
painters," he murmured). No foreign museums or collectors have
ever bought his work. (The National Gallery of Norway in Olso
has the 1959 tempera, Albert's Son, by donation from former U.S.
Ambassador to Norway L. Corris Strong.) Few foreigners recognize
his existence, although the abstract expressionists are well
known abroad, and even the Pop artists have attained some vogue.
When Bernard Dorival, director of Paris' Museum of Modern Art,
was asked about Wyeth, he replied, "Who? But perhaps we
pronounce his name differently here." Wyeth returns the
compliment. He has never felt the need to go to Europe--or,
for that matter, to much of anywhere else that is very far from
Chadds Ford or Cushing.
</p>
<p> Wyeth feels that if he wants to find exotic things, he need
only explore a couple of miles beyond the gas station at the
Chadds Ford crossroads. But if he does not first learn his own
small world to the last detail, how will he abstract the
vibrancy and vitality from it, how will he record the
unexpected, the out-of-kilter, the sudden clap of distant
thunder? So he has chosen to follow the advice of Poet-Painter
William Blake and see a world in a grain of sand.
</p>
<p> Rarely does he put more than a single figure in his stark
snow fields, against his battered barns, or on his bleak rock
shelves. "I want to show Americans what America is like," says
Wyeth. He does this with a uniquely American vision--man
pressed against the enormous sky by the upsurge of a land that
he has owned for such a scant time that he does not yet feel
part of it.
</p>
<p> Robert Frost wrote, "The land was ours before we were the
land's"; Wyeth paints Young America (1950) showing a boy in the
garb of a footloose youth riding an extravagant bicycle in all
the vastness of America. As he often does, Wyeth actually
painted the figures over a completed landscape, afterthoughts
in a void.
</p>
<p> From a Microcosm. "I think that the really American thing
in my painting is movement." says Wyeth. He was most excited by
the technical challenge of depicting the flying spokes of the
wheels. But there was the restless, lonely conquering of space,
which Americans have had as a challenge since they first set
foot in the broad New World. "I was struck by the distances in
this country," said Wyeth, "which are more imagined than
suggested in the picture--by the plains of Little Big Horn and
Custer and Daniel Boone and a lot of other things in our
history."
</p>
<p> The Young American is only a boy that Wyeth knows, not a
totem conjured up from American mythology. He proves that the
microcosm of Chadds Ford and Cushing is not so intimate a
topography that the whole world cannot be gleaned from it. As
Gertrude Stein wrote, "Anybody is as their land and air is," and
Wyeth's land and air happen to be everybody's. It is a visible
metaphor of any world for any man.
</p>
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