Art: Fact as Poetry

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A recent step in Wyeth's slow move away from anecdote is marked by a group of nudes. The model was a teenage girl named Siri Erickson, daughter of one of Wyeth's Finnish neighbors. "She had this immense vitality," says Wyeth. "I liked that directness. She's part of the country, planted in it, absolutely unselfconscious. Lipstick never entered her mind." He met her shortly after his favorite woman model (or character), Christina Olson, died. "Siri seemed like a bridge to me, or a new cycle; life coming out of death." The resulting pictures, done between 1968 and 1972, are among the solidest and least theatrical of Wyeth's work. They are also—to the extent that it is possible with naked flesh—puritanical pictures, chill in their contrasts of skin pallor and gloom, of skin against the resistant textures of grit, wood and opaque brown foliage. There is an edge of contrivance: Black Water, 1972, is much posed, and the profile of the body against its dark background is a trifle obvious as a metaphor of hills and undulant landscape. But in the best of these pictures, like The Sauna, 1968, and Indian Summer, 1970, laconic composition and reflective grasp of structure place this sturdy, blunt frame before us with a tender but remote specificity. Fact as poetry is becoming Wyeth's strength. · Robert Hughes