Monday, January 19, 2009
Andrew Wyeth
Posted by Zach in News

As I’m sure you now know, 91 year old Andrew Wyeth died last week.  His death allowed many an excuse to reexamine his work.

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His paintings operate on both a subjective personal plane and a transcendent universal plane.  The subjects he paints incite emotional power, but it’s because they are intensely personal subjects.  They are neighbors, friends, locations near his home.  He imprisons the emotions he feels in tempera or watercolor, like a fly in amber.  But the moods we experience when we see his works feel transcendent.  A stone wall might exist in a local way, but when used as a gateway for profundity, it becomes epic and universal.  

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Critics sometimes label his work “sentimental.”  Sentimentality is a dismissive term when it refers to maudlin self-medicating emotionalism–like the Victorian fascination with dead children, or the way moms enjoy movies that make them cry.  But can one easily dismiss sentiment itself?  What if one sees a fragile grandeur in the death of a crow?  What if one feels moved at the careless clumsy way humans tread on things.  Can the trampling of a weed have emotional resonance?  Art teacher Robert Beverly Hale famously remarked, “First we draw what we think we see; then we draw what we know; finally, we see what we know.”  Andrew Wyeth’s ability to see what he knows translates for the viewer into a type of gratitude.  This is a slap in the face to those who preoccupy themselves with the faddish ingratitude of disposable art.

 

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One reason Wyeth’s paintings offend critics is because they are sincere, unironic, and speak uninfected by Warhol-ian detachment or tongue-in-cheek-ness.  One Baltimore Sun writer scoffed that Andrew Wyeth’s paintings were representational.  “That appeals,” he said “to a public inadequately exposed to art and lacking confidence in its interpretive powers.”  Translation: Interpreter critics are mad when the art can speak for itself.  In fact they get so mad that Wyeth’s paintings can exist without them that their criticism becomes reckless and their sense of pitch a little high.  Consider critic Hilton Kramer’s manic and straining dismissal of Wyeth’s work: “It’s provincial, it’s sentimental, it’s illustration and it’s without substance.  In my opinion he can’t paint.  They are just sort of colored drawings.  It’s one of those illustrated dreams that enable people who don’t like art to fantasize about not living in the 20th century.”

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Andrew Wyeth can’t paint?  What the Sam Hill?  Did Andrew Wyeth’s 20th century subjects fantasize about not living in the 20th century?  It’s the self important myopia best represented by art critics in Manhattan.  Because they have to splash through puddles of homeless people’s urine in order to get to work, they scoff at Norman Rockwell’s depiction of a Midwestern Soda shop.  “It’s a mythological America!” they scream indignantly as they stand knee deep in garbage waiting to purchase tickets for a broadway sex show.  If they can’t be sensible at least they provide some entertainment when they strike with the iron fist of condescension.  Say with a furrowed brow that because you don’t like Wyeth, his paintings must be for people who don’t like art.

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Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, said, “Undoubtedly the criticism of his work has a lot to do with the politics of the art world and the demand by critics and many artists themselves that only contemporary abstraction be recognized as a viable language for the postwar era.  The cadre of critics who promoted that made a point of discrediting everything else and deliberately devaluing other artists’ work.”   Michael Kimmelman, a writer for the New York Times noted that the defenders of contemporary abstraction ensconced themselves in the New York art world.  “And as bohemianism itself became institutionalized, Wyeth encapsulated the artistic conservatives’ paradoxical idea of cultural disobedience through traditional behavior.”  Wyeth’s work deserves Solzhenitsyn’s praise of art. “By means of art we are sometimes sent dimly, briefly, revelations unattainable by reason, like that little mirror in fairy tales.  Look into it and you will see not yourself but for a moment, that which passes understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly and for which the soul begins to ache.”

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Wyeth’s paintings show the benefits of craftsmanship over instinct, tradition over novelty, and meditation over stimulation.  On that basis alone, it seems we can be grateful for his life and work.

8 Responses to “Andrew Wyeth”

ArtbyRuth comments:
Monday, January 19th, 2009

I have always loved his work. His use of light and line just thrills me. He inspired me to be a better painter and always will.

Bek comments:
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Great post.

G. David Brown comments:
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Very insightful! It’s as if we’ve come so far in having to verbally explain any imagery we see in order to justify its (ir)relevance that we’ve forgotten how to see the obvious, the joy and pathos right under our nose, and have lost the ability to understand a “representational” picture’s metaphors on the personal and universal playing fields.

*h. comments:
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

wow. someone doesn’t like nyc.
but wyeth’s okay (not as great as his dad, though), so i guess we can disagree on that city point.

Anna Grace comments:
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Thank you–I wasn’t aware that he had passed away.

And glorious post; you have a sixth sense for whose words to share.

Andrew Peterson comments:
Monday, January 26th, 2009

THANK you for this.

Paul comments:
Monday, January 26th, 2009

Really great post Zach! Thanks for writing this.

Brannon comments:
Saturday, February 21st, 2009

Your best post ever. Thanks!

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