Art: Fact as Poetry

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Certainly, much of Wyeth's success flows from nostalgia. Many people would like to project themselves at first hand, exchanging—for half an hour —their self-cleaning ovens for the black, bulbous wood stove that squats in the Ericksons' kitchen, and their disaster-crammed TV screens for the lean prospect glimpsed from the Olsons' attic window. Small wonder, then, that Wyeth's critics have dismissed "the other Andy" (as one of them, thinking of Warhol, called him) as a fabulist, and his images as a sentimental mix of frontierland and Cold Comfort Farm. The objection is almost political.

Theatricality has been in Wyeth's marrow since childhood, and his paintings, when weak, rarely permit one to forget the atmosphere of lantern-lit masquerade in which his father, the profusely talented illustrator N.C. Wyeth, reveled. When swashbuckling or fantasticated, as in much of his work before the 1960s, that theatricality could make Wyeth seem as vulgar as Thomas Hart Benton—though much subtler in design and drawing.

Although Wyeth is sometimes described as a "realist," the term is misleading when applied to him; his images are not direct transcriptions of what he sees, unedited slices of life. There is always a great deal of compression, suppression and choice—sometimes, it is true, bending to sentimentality but in his best work at the service of an elusive poetry of mood. The painter would like to be invisible, to have his subjects treat him as if he were not there. "You see, I'm a secretive bastard. I wish I could paint without me existing, that just my hands were there." This is theater as concealment, rather than display—the obverse of N.C. Wyeth's costume dramas. And it connects to the secretive postures of Andrew Wyeth's human subjects, painted looking away or from the back. There is more to these poses than literary anecdote, though they dwindle to that when Wyeth's delicacy falters. But at his best, his images become hermetic, despite their apparent candor; a peavey or a hanging cornhusk seems to brim with undisclosed biography. When the elusiveness at the core of his imagination reacts with his virtuoso power of rendering the soberest nuance of light, texture and weight, Wyeth becomes a formidable artist.