The life's work of one solitary artist, who has been described as a loner who wanders by himself in the woods, has come to epitomize, for an increasing number of Americans, a renewed faith in those values that have often been discredited during the last fifty years. It is no accident that this artist is Andrew Wyeth, even though other artists, including Wyeth's father and son, evidence equal technical skills and sensitivity to aesthetic nuances. Three concurrent exhibitions now afford us hindsight in viewing the works of Wyeth and him family: An American Vision: Three generations of Wyeth Arts; Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures; and the permanent display at the Brandywine River Museum.
What separates the work of Andrew Wyeth from much of the contemporary art world is not its realist genre - although many modern art critics would have you believe this - but the artist's unique ability to connect the act of painting with the inner workings of his soul. In a time of doubt, Andrew Wyeth has remained firmly anchored to those truths he has been able to discover within himself.
If in viewing these varied collections, we judge Wyeth as having failed to match the achievements of Rembrandt or Durer, then we must share in the fault, because society itself has abandoned the standards and ideals that have provided the foundation for all great art of the past. That Andrew Wyeth and others persevered in the cultural vacuum of the last fifty years is in itself an achievement.
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, which first appeared in the Soviet Union and traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. prior to its September opening at the Dallas Museum of Art, amply illustrates that Andrew didn't accomplish this feat entirely on his own. He had a remarkable family, whose traditions date back to Nicholas Wyeth, an English stonemason who settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1645 and helped in the construction of the earliest buildings of Harvard University.
This exhibition of 117 paintings, spanning a century of work, traces the history of a family's quest for artistic excellence, and in so doing offers an example to a nation sorely tried to rediscover its own ideals.
Newell Convers (N.C.) Wyeth (1882-1945), Andrew Wyeth (b.1917), and Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), although sharing the same blood and prodigious talents, are as different in temperament and vision as the time periods they worked in. Collectively, they project in turn the virile optimism of nineteenth-century America, the alienation of the postwar period, and the pluralistic confusion of the post-Modernist era.
An N.C. Wyeth painting of a cow with its Newborn Calf (1917) reflects a nineteenth-century sensibility that finds joy in the bucolic pleasures of rural farm life. An admirer of the Hudson River School that fused God, nature, and man into one holistic vision, N.C. Wyeth created an orderly universe on canvas that was founded upon classical standards of aesthetic beauty.
Spring Fed (1967), created fifty years alter by N.C.'s son, Andrew, takes the same theme but infuses it with a palpable aura of alienation. The cows, now silhouetted against the snow patches of a barren hill, are observed through a primitively constructed farm window framed by a
...
Read Full Article
|
