Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education A child of the interwar years, Andrew Wyeth came of age during the 1930s at the height of regionalism and the emergence of American modernism with its emphasis on abstract principles of structure and formal handling. High-spirited, intelligence, and artistically precocious from an early age, the youngest child of N.C. and Carolyn Bockius Wyeth, Andrew was schooled at home and received his only art training from his father, who was America’s best-known illustrator. He rapidly developed under his father’s guidance and achieved nearly instant celebrity as a young artist when his first New York show in 1937 at the Macbeth Gallery sold out. Although Andrew absorbed many important qualities from his father, not least a prodigious work ethic, N.C.’s own style—the Andrew Wyeth, Turkey Pond, 1944, 1995.2 emphasis on action, epic scale, and bold use of color and paint handling—was something for the young artist to react against. Unlike his father’s preference for oil, Andrew has worked in tempera since first experimenting with the medium in the mid-1930s under the guidance of another of his father’s students, Peter Hurd, who later married Andrew’s sister, Henriette. Andrew was also attached to watercolor, another medium in which N.C. showed little interest. Turkey Pond is among Wyeth’s first mature tempera paintings. Earlier works, such as Soaring (1942, finished in 1950) and Winter Fields (1942), make use of dramatic points of view—looking down from above or flat on the ground looking up—and serve to disorient the viewer. Turkey Pond, in contrast, is devoid of special effects and concentrates attention on a quotidian emptiness, a lone figure striding across a field. The figure, with back turned to the viewer, is anonymous, the sky is an allover, cool gray with a suggested light, and the landscape is relatively flat and uniform, save the nearby pond. Andrew’s father suggested thatTurkey Pond was a failure, that it needed more visual interest such as a dog to accompany the figure or a hunting rifle. With this major painting, among Andrew’s largest temperas up to this time, the young artist began to assert his independence from his father’s direct influence. In part, his new approach in the tempera medium, characterized by technical and stylistic precision and suggestiveness of absence, can be attractive to the artist’s new young wife, Betsy, who encouraged Andrew to develop his own quiet, introspective, and poetic sensibilities that were so different from his father’s. The painting, a gift to the museum in 1995 by Andrew and Betsy Wyeth in memory of Walter Anderson, depicts Andrew friend from boyhood and, beginning in late adolescence, his frequent model. Compositionally and,

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education to some extent thematically, Turkey Pond stands as an important precursor to Wyeth’s most famous work, Christina’s World, 1948 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). In both paintings, lone figures with backs turned to the viewer are positioned in the foregrounds of empty fields with dry, wild grasses rising to high horizon lines placed in the upper third of the paintings. In 1987 Wyeth described Turkey Pond: “I was very pleased with it because it had an authority in the feeling of his striding with blond hair but only the back of his showing.” The subject, according to Wyeth, “was the silence of those fall mornings in Maine I’d seen so many times.” With the death of N.C. Wyeth the following fall (1945) in a tragic train accident, Andrew’s work would change even more profoundly, and the relatively optimistic images of youthful vigor and bright promise, such as Turkey Pond, would give way to darker meditations on life’s quiddity. The Wood Stove and Alvaro and Christina, along with Hayrack (1958) in the Farnsworth collection, belong to Wyeth’s Olson series of over three hundred drawings, watercolors, and temperas related to Christina Olson and her brother, Alvaro, their deteriorating saltwater homestead and barn, and various objects and furnishings found therein. The Olson works span three decades, from Wyeth’s first encounter with the saltwater farm in 1939 and continuing until after the death of Alvaro on Christmas Eve 1967, followed by Christina’s less than a month later in January 1968. Wyeth’s special relationship with the Olson house and its inhabitants was through his future wife, Betsy James, a Cushing neighbor who had known the reclusive Olsons since childhood. Initially struck by the spare beauty of the house and its setting on a hill looking to the mouth of the river and the island-dotted Muscongus Bay, Wyeth soon became an intimate friend of Christina and Alvaro and was allowed free access to the house and environs. Over the years, the house and its inhabitants became interchangeable, the subject of a sustained meditation on Maine and the human condition. Both Alvaro and Christina and The Wood Stove, like many of Wyeth’s most important watercolors, evolved from numerous rapidly executed drawings that succinctly emphasize a process of shifting ideas and isolating key objects and compositional schemes. The final watercolors are executed in a technique the artist calls drybrush: nearly dry pigment laid down with finely bristled brushes to achieve delicate lines, sharp edges, and precisely rendered textures. In practice, drybrush paintings are always a mixture of wet and dry painting techniques that nevertheless stand as a unique bridge between Wyeth’s more freely painted Andrew Wyeth, Wood Stove, 1962, 1962.1266

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education “pure” watercolors and the more precisely detailed tempera paintings. The prosaically titled The Wood Stove includes Christina Olson seated with her back to the viewer at a small table looking toward the field behind the house. In the opposite window are her favorite geraniums. The chair on the right is where Alvaro usually sat, the large Glenwood wood-burning stove dominating the left center of the painting. Betsy Wyeth has described the kitchen: Behind the stove are two doors that open into the woodshed. One of Christina’s cats sleeps on the floor next to the wood box. If the fire was low and Alvaro was away, she would hitch her chair across the room, put a couple of logs in her lap, and hitch back to the stove. The only hot water in the house came from the teakettle or the storage tank on the right side of the stove. Although Christina’s face is not seen and Alvaro is absent, the room is a portrait of both by association. In a closely related work, Geraniums, where the view is of this same south-facing window but from the outside looking in, we see only a faint silhouette of Christina. The geraniums, however, in their gnarled, twisting stems suggest Christina’s own body, ravaged by untreated disease, but also her strength and endurance. The red blossoms, played again the shadowy interior, carry her vital spirit and warmth—plain, ordinary, in a botanical sense, but with heightened brilliance in a world of dark and weathered wear, as Wyeth had come to know Christina. Alvaro would sit for only one portrait (Oil Lamp, 1945) but the many surrogate portraits, including the empty rocking chair in the right corner of Woodstove, describe his lanky physique, simple strength, resilience, and retiring nature as surely and certainly more accurately than any photographic likeness would be able to do. The black, soot-encrusted stove, central to the room, is also Christina, warming the well-used teakettle, a small note go grace and gentility in a harsh but somehow comfortable setting. Wyeth seemed to sense that his longtime models and friends were slipping away. Within five years both would be gone. One of the two posthumous portraits, painted after the deaths of Christina and Alvaro during the winter of 1967-68, Alvaro and Christina is among Wyeth’s most haunting images. The two doors seen from the attached woodshed lead back into the kitchen. Alvaro would usually use the door on the left, which was closest to the wood pile, in his ceaseless and largely futile attempt Andrew Wyeth, Alvaro and Christina, 1968, 1969.1646 to keep warmth in the house (the wood-

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education stove provided the only heat in the house until, in the Olsons’ final years, neighbors gave them a kerosene heater). Christina would “hitch herself through the blue door on the right on her way to the primitive four-hoper at the far end of the shed. The artist later spoke of the painting in an interview with Thomas Hoving: I conceived it as a portrait of the whole Olson environment and I painted it the summer after Christina and her brother Alvaro had both died. I went in there and suddenly the contents of that room seemed to express those two people, the basket, the buckets and the beautiful blue door with all the bizarre scratches on it that the dog had made. They were all gone, but powerfully there, nonetheless. Memory, presence in absence, time, mortality, and the strangely affecting attention to the commonplace are constant themes in Wyeth’s work, themes that coincide with and are reinforced by the textured, layered, caplet technical and mental processes that give these works such originality and emotional resonance. In 1991 the museum acquired the Olson house itself, a gift from John and Lee Adams Sculley, and now a satellite facility open to the public from Memorial Day through Columbus Day. The house, left largely unfurnished and remarkably preserved as Wyeth painted it, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the only such historic structure so-designated by reason of its status as the “model” for works of art by a living artist. Andrew Wyeth has long favored spare interior settings of old houses in Maine and the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania for many of his most haunting works. In many of Wyeth’s empty interiors there is a suggestion of flickering movement and foreboding, of an event that has occurred or is about to happen. The choppy, wind- whipped sea on a rising tide is almost pulled into Her Room. A strange half-light plays across the room, coming from all directions at once. The perspective, despite its apparent precision, is slightly off. There is almost a dollhouse quality to the interior with its oversize furnishings and too-perfect arrangement. Originally titled Eclipse, the painting was inspired by a solar eclipse and thoughts of Wyeth’s young son Nicholas, who spent many hours alone on the upper reaches of the tidal St. George River. The painting is named for the artist’s wife, Betsy, whose family’s summer home and farm on Broad Cove in Cushing became the Wyeths’ permanent Maine residence following their marriage. Speaking of the mood that the artist was seeking for this picture, Wyeth’s biographer and close friend, Richard Meryman, observed, “Wyeth was alone in the house on the day of an eclipse of the sun. Suddenly the front door blew open. The air fishing into the stillness of the room swung the window curtains with it. There was an eerie eclipse light on the water, roughened by a momentary squall. He worried suddenly about his son Nicholas, who was off in a boat; seeing the wooden chest on the floor he remembered a corpse in a coffin that had once been ‘rousted upriver’ in a dory.” He later changed the title to Her Room because, according to Wyeth, “It is a picture of the aloneness of a New England home. The new title is very personal and, I think, gives the thing for warmth.” The strange mood of the picture arises from contrasting elements: a gridline compositional scheme and even the mathematically precise arrangement of the seashells are seen again the natural randomness of the storm-blown water and shifting, illogical lighting effects. Wyeth has also hinted at private “secrets” in the painting, including the possibility of a tiny self-portrait in the brass doorknob (a reference to Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, perhaps) and the suggestion of a cat peering into the room from the far right window, camouflaged by foliage. The faded pink window covering possibly refer to Christina Olson’s pink

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education dress and the painting that established Wyeth’s national reputation, Christina’s World, 1948. Such personal and self- referential associations are commonplace throughout Wyeth’s oeuvre spanning more than six decades. Her Room is the result of at least sixteen preliminary studies, including drawings and relatively finished watercolors. It was begun in the summer of 1963 and completed over a course of three and a half months. Like most of Wyeth’s temperas, Her Room, with its meticulous, nearly hyper-real detail and finish, began with a quick pencil drawing of just a few lines to indicate the basic composition. Subsequent drawings and watercolors, sometimes with written notations as to color, light, and placement of forms, suggests a furious, experimental pace of execution. Most are loosely rendered—including fingerprints, scrapes, and smudges—with additions, subtractions, and numerous changes visible as evidence of a process that is intuitive and often far removed from the original idea. Many of the studies verge on near total abstraction, and Wyeth has admitted, “half the time I don’t even know what I am doing,” in a frenzy of creative energy linking him, in attitude if not final intention, with abstract expressionism of the preceding decade. Her Room can be considered among the Farnsworth’s most important acquisitions from this period. It reinforced a long relationship with the artist that extends to the creation of the Center for the Wyeth Family in Maine, which opened at the Farnsworth in 1998, and to the present. Moreover, Her Room is among those painting created when the artist was at mid career and had perfected his mastery of the tempera medium, which reaffirmed his national prominence. With this painting Wyeth can be said to have extended a tradition of American realism stemming from Homer’s sea paintings and their innate pessimism, to Hopper’s evocation of American isolation and introspection, to contemporary art’s renewed interest in a sense of place and edgy dreams on the brink of the millennium.

Andrew Wyeth, Her Room, 1963, 1964.1313

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Andrew Wyeth Arts in Education

Reference

Belanger, Pamela J., Maine in America: American Art at The Farnsworth Art Museum, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, Distributed by University Press of New England, 2000, pp. 152-158. Transcribed by Lindsay Taylor and Claire Horne.

Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org