Different strokes from Andrew Wyeth

5 April 2012

Andrew Wyeth, an American painter born in 1917, was of precisely the same generation as Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Robert Motherwell, a boy when Rothko and de Kooning were young men, a young man when Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were boys. From all these, their acclaimed Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Pop, he stood apart in intellectual and physical isolation, drawing inspiration and subject from the landscape and people of two small patches of territory in Maine and Pennsylvania, both bleak, one on the sea’s edge, windblown and cold. While all his contemporaries were breaking the old boundaries of painting, Wyeth clung to them and to the romantic myth of the solitary American, not the ever westward-driving hero, but the settled rural American in his wake who, farmer or fisher, lives and dies doing the best he can, at one with nature that is both his friend and enemy, making what he must of circumstance. He was, in a sense, one of these himself.

Light and shade: Andrew Wyeth’s Crossed Swords, 1992. Wyeth, who died aged 91, painted into his eighties without discernible loss of power

When, 18 months ago, at the age of 91, he died, widely celebrated for the realism of the animal fur and weathered human skin to which he lent so sharp an edge, for his distillation of all the visual elements of heat and cold, light and shadow, tone and texture that lend a landscape or a room a heightened sense of time and place, for a fidelity to barebones nature through eyes that far outdid the lens of every camera, his work seemed so outmoded, his subjects so bygone and his vision of them so quaint that most of us in Britain were taken by surprise, for we thought him dead and buried long before. But if here we had heard nothing of him since a laudatory exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980 (13 years later, the RA omitted him from its encyclopaedic survey of 20th-century American art), this was not so in America where, though his style barely changed in the six decades since his springing into the public eye with Christina’s World of 1948 (immediately bought by MOMA), he was astonishingly and uncritically popular. There was never any slackening in the demand for his work and he continued to paint until very late in his long life with little sign of the rheumy eye and trembling hand of so many octogenarians.

Trauma: September 11 by his grandson, Jamie Wyeth

Christina’s World, however, in which an unlovely spinster paralysed by polio has crawled from her farmhouse to pick hedgerow berries, was his Mona Lisa.

Among those who bought his paintings was the Merrill Lynch Collection of the Bank of America, and these are now on view in Dulwich Picture Gallery. They are too few and far from fair in their representation of Andrew Wyeth’s work. They are so few indeed that they give the impression of a sudden afterthought, an omission hastily and rashly righted — and that may be exactly what they are, for long ago in the tiresome Twenties the bank had commissioned Andrew’s father, Newell Convers Wyeth (NC), to embellish its walls with murals celebrating the history of trade by ship, of which there is some record in four small paintings — Phoenician Biremes, Elizabethan Galleons, Clipper Ships and Tramp Steamer — in the first room of the exhibition. They recall paintings by his English contemporary Frank Brangwyn, a once popular painter of much the same sort of subject — but infinitely better — whose work he must have known from book illustrations, for NC was nothing if not an illustrator. Perhaps thinking that in these and their many other works by NC they had Wyeth enough, Merrill Lynch let others make Andrew famous and were able only to buy the dross.

Gone fishing: Young Maine Fisherman by NC Wyeth, 1933

The first room is not, as an informed visitor might think, merely an introduction to an exhibition centred on the worthy Andrew, for it was at the knee of NC that he learned to draw and paint, but is an introduction to NC himself, whose work is the most substantial body of the exhibition. We must feign astonishment at his ability to illustrate the tedious tales of Washington Irving, Mark Twain and Conan Doyle; they are, alas, very like but not one whit superior to the deservedly forgotten illustrators who, in my childhood, laboured to put face and place into our imaginings of the clean-limbed adventures addressed to clean-limbed boys by Captain Frederick Marryat and Gunby Hadath.

A generous critic might argue that with episodes in which such figures as Paul Revere and John Paul Jones appear, NC is the last flicker of an American tradition of history painting, but his work is always too literal and too dependent on the text to be anything loftier than illustrating. Too often he risks ridicule — as with a ludicrous painting of medieval knights in single combat ludicrously titled Sir Nigel sustains England’s Honour in the Lists, up and down went the long shining blades with flash of sparks at every Parry, while On Christmas Night in Bethlehem Town is as banal as any Bible illustration by the execrable Margaret W Tarrant, a popular English illustrator of the time who reduced Crucifixion and Resurrection to events of mawkish sentimentality. Born in 1882, NC was still going strong in the Second World War, and had he not (mercifully for us) been killed in a crash between his car and a train in 1945, there can be little doubt that with borrowed texts his images of Korea and Vietnam too would now be hanging in Dulwich.

As if the work of Andrew’s father were not trite enough, the jejune paintings of his son, Jamie, form the terminal bracket of this unworthy show. Born in 1946, Jamie is unashamedly a borrower, a crass incompetent incapable of drawing and able to paint only in the idiom of either father or grandfather — corny is the word that comes to mind, closely followed by naive, stale, uncomprehending, vulgar and inane. At his inept attempt to portray Nureyev as a dancer waiting in the wings, mocking laughter is the only reasonable response. As for his September 11, no patriotic blindness can excuse the dim-witted dumb banality of this pondered response to that dreadful day in 2001, combining the collapse of the twin towers of New York with the photograph in which Joe Rosenthal immortalised the 28th Regiment of the US Army taking Mount Suribachi from the Japanese in February 1945.

I cannot understand why Dulwich mounted this exhibition, nor why the Merrill Lynch Collection wanted strangers to see these paintings, for the only conclusion to be drawn from them is that bankers are as useless as connoisseurs of art as they are as the guardians of a nation’s money. If the plane transporting these paintings had fallen into the Atlantic on its way here, the cultural loss would have been zero, and pretty well zero even for Americans, for the few paintings by Andrew Wyeth are, with one exception, minor and insignificant examples. The exception is Antler Crown, a very large watercolour, in which a small Christmas tree hangs from a ring of antlers in the shelter of a porch that partly frames a winter landscape (Merrill Lynch will not permit us to illustrate it).

The most wretched thing about this dire exhibition is that it has probably scuppered for several decades any possibility of one devoted to Andrew Wyeth alone. In the great scheme of art’s history he matters not at all, but as the last of a line of observant realists of the American Outdoors that began with Caleb Bingham early in the 19th century and included Eakins, Homer, Remington and Eastman Johnson, he is of some interest, if only for his use of technically laborious tempera and dry-brush watercolour, and his survival, uninfluenced, through decades of the most powerfully influential art movements ever lauded by propagandist critics, curators and collectors.

I beg visitors to Dulwich to forget NC, Jamie and other worthless hacks of the Wyeth family. Concentrate on Andrew, consider the subtleties of his techniques, his quirk of composition and conjunction, and bear in mind that only Antler Crown fairly represents his qualities. Then find Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, 1987 (I know of no more recent book), and see how scrupulous his preparation was, how bleak his scrutiny could be (with the nude as bleak as Freud). It may then be just possible to see in his work something of Dürer, with facsimiles of whose watercolours of grasses and the hare he fell in love when only 13. This exhibition does a serious, devoted and fastidious painter grave disservice.

The Wyeth Family is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (020 8693 5254, dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk) until August 22. Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat-Sun 11am-5pm. Admission £9, concs available

The Wyeth Family
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Gallery Road, SE21 7AD

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