Art: Fact as Poetry

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The house itself is strictest Wyeth: gabled white clapboard, severe and trim and sagging a little off plumb; country-craftsman geometry perched on a flat tongue of land at the sea's edge in Cushing, Me. It looks thrifty, and was; its owner bought it for $50 and trucked it to the site. Inside, the illusion of having entered one of the man's pictures multiplies. The ceilings are low, the furniture old and spartan, the rooms small, white and uncluttered. A lot of distinct air surrounds each object. Through the front window, one sees a lawn with an 18th century cannon pointed at the indifferent horizon.

And out the back, what? An aged dory, weathering silver among the four thousand blades of brown grass, each painted separately in egg tempera? In fact, no: a dark, secretive-looking Stutz Blackhawk, $38,500 worth of Republican Mafia dream-hearse with a Cadillac engine and custom-fitted luggage, polished like an immense eggplant. Frank Sinatra has one, Elvis Presley owns two; but this model, an engraved plate on the dashboard attests, was fabricated in Turin for Andrew Wyeth. "People expect me to get around in an oxcart," says the painter. "But this thing's pretty useful. I can drive it into the fields when the weather's cold, turn on the heater, and sit on the roof to do a watercolor with my legs hanging inside."

In a way the car is appropriate, for Wyeth, at 56, is one of America's most durable institutions. The audience for advanced art is, as Roy Lichtenstein once wryly observed, about as big as the audience for advanced chemistry. Wyeth's audience, however, runs into the millions. His infrequent exhibitions —the most recent of which is a retrospective organized by Art Historian Wanda M. Corn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco—jam the galleries with visitors; in the U.S. only Picasso can pull more crowds than Wyeth. The price of a Wyeth watercolor begins at about $20,000, and his minutely detailed tempera paintings, of which he manages to finish about two a year, are said to have gone past $100,000 apiece.

Nor is any American painter coated with a more adhesive legend: the salty country boy who never went to school and picked it all up in his father's studio; the brusque down-Easter with a Huck Finn smile who never went for that French art stuff and never once moved out of America. The weathered faces of Wyeth's favorite subjects —Christina Olson, Karl Kuerner or Ralph Cline, the veteran patriot with a skull like a parchment-covered round shot—have become nearly as familiar as Charlie Brown or Donald Duck. They are seen as icons of survival and indomitability, and their clipped-tongue rectitude evokes the silence of the bald eagle.

The landscape they inhabit resembles them. Dour, bare and snow-patched, with low horizons of brown hill or gray water, a wind incessantly prying at the boards of the creaky frame houses, it is the soil from which virtue is meant to grow; even the pumpkin on Wyeth's fence post, if pumpkins could vote, would have voted for Ike. "Wyeth country"—the Pennsylvania farm land around Chadds Ford, where he spends the winter, and the summer acreage in Maine—has become landscape as myth or monument by now, the American middlebrow's equivalent of Cezanne's Mont-Ste.-Victoire or Monet's lily ponds at Giverny.