Andrew Wyeth's Problematic Legacy

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Andrew Wyeth, who died today at 91 at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa., was the great problem of American modern art. He was a problem first because he so completely refused to be modern in any terms that the art world cared about or could stomach. Long after it was no longer fashionable or even permissible to practice a flinty, granular realism, Wyeth went on making pictures with the kind of brushwork that specified the world in almost molecular detail. That his technical capabilities were so apparent only made it more annoying to some critics that he wouldn't turn his back on them. Virtuosity of that kind was something that we almost wanted to get off the table, an embarrassing reminder of pleasures that painting had to shed if it was to move forward into the brave new world of Modernism and everything that came after.

And worst of all was his popularity, which for much of his life was enormous. Until the other Andy came along — Andy Warhol — Wyeth and Norman Rockwell were without doubt the two most widely recognized names in American art. Wyeth's museum shows were blockbusters and his sale prices strong, especially after the Japanese discovered him in the 1980s.

Even when Wyeth is admitted into the canon, he's held a bit at arm's length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City owns his most famous canvas, Christina's World, which it acquired in 1948, soon after it was painted, for just $1,800. But while the picture is always on display at MoMA, it's consigned to what you might call an anteroom on the margins of the more respectably modern galleries, a salon des refuses that it shares with Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad. Seeing Christina splayed across her field of grass, gazing toward that house on the horizon, it's easy to imagine that it's the citadel of MoMA she's looking at so poignantly, the place she still has not entirely entered, even if she is inside.

It's true that the discoveries of Picasso and Pollock don't much ruffle the grave surfaces of Wyeth's work. For much of his career he painted not only in watercolors but in tempera, a pigment and egg-white medium that predates oil paint. His only art school was the Chadds Ford home he grew up in. His father was the greatly gifted illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose thronged imaginings of scenes from Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans made him rich and famous. He decided early on that his talented son should also be an illustrator and set him to work hard at it from his teens.

Andrew Wyeth's skills as a draughtsman — and maybe also as a showman — are owed to his boisterous, demanding father. But the quiet and spareness of his pictures, the sense of longing and abandonment, of having exacted the maximum effect from the minimum means, may be a reaction against his father's swashbuckling art. His father also marked Wyeth's life strongly in one other way. In 1945 the elder Wyeth, along with his 4-year-old grandson by Andrew's brother Nat, was killed when his car stalled on a railroad track. It was an event that Wyeth's biographer, Richard Meryman, says split Wyeth's life in two, so that he spent the rest of it "processing the first 28 years — a long, unraveling of love and guilt and rage."

Whatever the reason, there's a spareness and gravity in Wyeth's art after World War II that would be his trademark for the rest of his career. His landscapes are more astringent and cooler. His portraits too. The people in those portraits are known to him. Most of them are family, like his son Jamie, who also became an artist, or neighbors like Karl and Anna Kuerner, a German-American couple he painted many times in Chadds Ford, and Christina Olson, the crippled woman in Christina's World whom he knew from around his summer home in Cushing, Maine. But though these people are his familiars, they look to us enclosed, subdued, even solemn, always keeping something of themselves to themselves.

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