Georgetowner Review of Andrew Wyeth Exhibit: Looking Out, Looking In

Andrew Wyeth

Rod and Reel, 1975

The thought of a mid-to-late 20th-century artist painting washed out landscapes of rural America and being hailed as a cultural icon and national treasure is almost unimaginable. In the most aggressively transformative century in recorded history, the geography of art alone shifted so drastically and disparately that it is virtually impossible to sum up its evolution. Compared with Cubism, performance art, film and digital media, a pastoral scene of meadow grass and an old barn does not seem like much at all.

Yet Andrew Wyeth, a rural painter of American regionalist life and landscapes from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, managed to capture the imagination of this full-throttle era, and his work continues to challenge and inspire new generations to this day.

At the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30, “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In,” is a new exhibit centered around the recent acquisition of one of the artist’s seminal paintings, “Wind from the Sea” (1947). This is the first fully realized exploration of Wyeth’s frequent use of windows as subjects in his work, showcasing some 60 watercolors, drawings and tempera paintings. It reveals how the artist returned to windows repeatedly, probing the formal and conceptual richness of this most common subject in his and all our lives.

The works in this exhibit are haunted by ghostly shadows and memories that lie just beyond the picture plane. Wyeth devoted himself to visual art when he was still a child, trained by his father, the renowned but troubled illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings for such literary classics as ‘Treasure Island’ remain among the most acclaimed illustrations of all time. From his father, Wyeth inherited a love of nature and poetry, particularly an affinity for Robert Frost, but it seems like he absorbed a great deal of subtle, narrative illusory qualities as well. However, unburdened by the shackles of commercial illustration, Wyeth was able to realize a far greater level of dissonance and durability than his father’s work could ever achieve.

Windows allow for reflection, as seen in the watercolor “Rod and Reel” (1975), where a darkly reflective window set into a whitewashed wall slowly reveals tiers of subtly fragmented landscapes from the adjacent farmland through the glass. Onlookers are suddenly brought into an unexpectedly dimensional world on the surface of the paper.

The idea of reflections is fitting, as this collective work becomes a journey into the artist’s mind – which in Wyeth’s case dwarfs almost any effort by Surrealism to explore the depths of the unconscious. Wyeth lived most of his life in his Brandywine Valley hometown and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine, where the familiarity with his environment grew so intimate that he was able to truly divest himself of self-awareness and external forces of judgment. He spent so much time painting these scenes that they became a part of him, and so the work is at once an exact portrait of the artist’s mind as well as the reality of the subject. And Wyeth’s painterly expression of this duality gets contentedly lost within its own schism.

The paintings have a temporal haze to them, as if they could just vanish at any moment; the atmosphere he manages to produce is a depiction of something that can really be seen only in a state of unfocused rumination. (This idea might be an indication as to why Wyeth always insisted he was an “abstract” painter.)

There are occasional moments in his works where things just vanish, as in his tempera painting “Seed Corn” (1948). A high window looks out onto a sprawling gray landscape, with strung-up corn on either side drying out for the next season’s seeds. Peculiarly, the center rail of the window just disappears halfway out, fading into the muddy gray sky. At first it seems like a shallow surrealist gesture, but really it is much purer than that. It’s as if Wyeth had lost sight of the fact that the rest of the window even existed, as his eyes and brush strayed out toward the rolling hills beyond. And the strange thing is it looks perfectly natural.

Some of Wyeth’s appeal is absolutely his technical facility with his medium. His work offers such spoils of formal virtuosity, floating between hyperrealism and textured painterly richness, that scholars and museum-goers alike should swoon with awe.

From a historical perspective, there is also a great deal to play with. In many of these paintings, it is difficult to ignore the undertones of Wyeth’s contemporary influence, from the geometric purity of Piet Mondrian or Franz Kline, to the softer geometric haze of Hans Hofmann or Mark Rothko, and even the textural harmony and distributed brushwork of Mark Tobey’s all-over early abstract style of painting.

From the early regional side of things, there are parallels between Wyeth’s work and the atmospheric landscapes of forgotten early American painters like Dwight Tryon, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Henry Twachtman and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Of course, a great deal is further owed to his predecessors Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler as well, but quite frankly this game could go on forever.

One mark of a great artist is surely their ability to influence an audience to think and consider their surroundings. In the case of Wyeth, his subject is perhaps thought and environment itself. It is the moment when we look out a window into the gray sky, catching a glimpse of mortality as we ponder our myriad little human dilemmas, mired by history and personal experience but singularly products of our own creation, moving unavoidably into the future.

“Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In” is on view at the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30. For more information, visit www.nga.gov.

http://www.georgetowner.com/articles/2014/may/07/andrew-wyeth-national-gallery-looking-out-looking/

Andrew Wyeth and Robert Frost – Expressing the Inner Through the Outer

Winter Light – Andrew Wyeth – Presentd to Robert Frost on His 80th Birthday

“Andrew Wyeth had grown up listening to his father read Frost’s poetry aloud….

“Frost’s letter of July 2 is particularly notable for its closing remarks: ‘You and I have something in common that might almost make one wonder if we hadn’t influenced each other, been brought up in the same family, or been descended from the same settlers.’ Frost declared that he saw in Wyeth’s ‘a spirit I can’t help thinking kindred to mine.’

“During the course of his career, Wyeth often refereed to artists whose work he admired–especially Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, as well as contemporaies Franz Klilne and Edward Hopper, but it was Robert Frost in whose work he consistently recognized the kindred vision that Frost had described. …

“Wyeth wrote:

‘From the beginning when my father first read his poems to me Mr. Frost’s clarity of vision has been a very real challenge and inspiration to me in my work.  In fact it is hard for me to separate in my own mind he word Frost from anything that does not mean crystal clear emotions.  … I feel I have painted his portrait dozens of time.  … A part of him lives in the best of all of my work.’ ”  Looking Out, Looking In Wyeth Exhibition Catalogue, pgs. 22-25.

The authors of the Exhibition Catalogue continue by clarifying that although most think of Frost as a simple poet whose work was little more than verbal portraits of rural America, it was not that aspect of Frost that inspired Wyeth.  Rather, Wyeth identified with the poet’s understanding of the more terrifying aspects of life.

“Among the poems by Frost that Wyeth undoubetedly knew well was ‘Home Burial,’….  A narrative poem, the work focuses on the verbal exchange between a husband and wife grieving over the death of their first-born child.  At the center of the poem is a window through which the small mound marking the child’s grave is visible….

“In 1947, when he began Wind from the Sea, Wyeth had been exploring the Olson property–house and land–for nearly a decade.  He would have known that the view out the window with the cracked shade and frayed curtains was toward the private graveyard where generations of Hathorns and Olsons were buried.  In Frost’s poem, the window serves as both a literal frame through which death is viewed nd a metaphorical lens through which grief is experienced. …

“Wind from the Sea is first, a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill.  Far from a replication of a bedroom window, the painting is a disciplined distillaton of object and experience with an expansive subtext of personal symbolism.  For Wyeth, the painting became a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness, and also a metaphorical portrait of Christina–stoic, strong, yet feminine.  Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death.  Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay.  Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cememtery.  Christina and Alvaro would be buried there just weeks apart in the winter of 1967-1968.  Andrew Wyeth chose the same cemetery as his burial place.  …

“…it may be a later poem of Frost’s that offers the clearest metaphorical equivalent for the many paintings of windows that Wyeth would create following Wind from the Sea.  ‘Tree at My Window’ …. the only voice in ‘Tree at My Window’ is the poet’s.

• Tree at my window, window tree,
• My sash is lowered when night comes on.
• But let there never be curtain drawn
• Between you and me. …
• Your head so much concerned with outer,
• Mine with inner, weather.

“Frost’s choice of inner and outer ‘weather’ meditated by a window mirrors Wyeth’s own creative process.  A keen observer of the natural world, he used exterior prompts for interior purposes–looking out triggered looking in.” Looking Out, Looking In Wyeth Exhibition Catalogue, pgs. 25-27.

Spring Fed – Andrew Wyeth – 1967 – Tempera on Panel

“One of the most striking expamples of the relationship between the exterior world Wyeth observed and the interior world he conjured may be seen in the tempera … Spring Fed, an interior view from the barn of his neighbor, Karl Kuerner. ” Looking Out, Looking In Wyeth Exhibition Catalogue, pgs. 27-29.

The Olson House in Cushing Maine – Christina’s World – Andrew Wyeth

The Olson House – Cushing, Maine

“Built on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, the house had once served as a beacon for ships, returning to harbor.  Long since fallen into disrepair, the clapboard structure was described by some as a ‘tinderbox.’” Looking Out, Looking In – Wyeth Exhibition Catalogue , p. 6

“By 1939, when Wyeth first saw the house, Christina’s mother and father had died and her brother had given up seafaring to care for his increasingly disabled sister, then forty-six. …

“Already in a state of disrepair when Wyeth met the Olsons, the house continued to deteriorate over time.  Rags were stuffed in broken windows; newspapers replaced missing clapboards.  Winter winds blew through cracks unimpeded.  Betsy [Wyeth’s wife] recalled an acquaintance remarking that heating the crumbling strucure was like ‘trying to heat a lobster trap.’

“Wyeth often spoke of his preference for the winter landscape–for trees without leaves, fields without crops–skeletal earth.  At the Olson House he found an architectural equivalent.  By the time he had arrived, nature had stripped the house, once painted white, of its outer layer.  Inside, wallpaper curled away from parlor walls; curtains that had once ‘dressed’ windows hung tattered and frayed.  Time and nature had already exposed the bare-bones structure of what would become one of his most importatnt subjects.

“Following his initial visit to the house in 1939, Wyeth returned every summer.  As his friendship with the Olsons deepened, he was given free run of the property.  Over time, he studied the house as he had studied the cones and cubes in his father’s studio–from every angle, from inside and out. As he matured, Wyeth’s technical gifts became ever more evident.  Equally remarkable, however, was his growing ability to enrich his compositions with layers of metaphor and personal symbolism.”  Exhibition Catalogue, p. 18

Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson of Christina’s World – Andrew Wyeth

Wind from the Sea – Andrew Wyeth – National Gallery of Art

“Wind from the Sea is a window, curtains, and a distant landscape.  Windows, of course, have fascinated artists for centuries and the literature on the subject is extensive…. [Wyeth] completed more than three hundred images of windows–compositions free of human figures.  Family members confirmed what the visual evidence disclosed:  Wyeth was fascinated by windows. ”

Anderson, Brock. Exhibition Catalogue, p. 1

“On a hot August day in 1947,  Andrew Wyeth entered an abandoned bedroom on the third floor of a house in Maine intending to make a watercolor study of a dormer window.  When noonday sun sent the temperature soaring, he crossed to the other side of the room and opened a wondow with a view to the sea.  A soft ocean breeze lifted curtainsthat had lain undisturbed for decades.  Birds delicatedly crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly.  Wyeth made a quick sketch and later told a friend that the chance event had made his ‘hair stand on end.’  By early fall, he had translated that momentary experience into one of his most remarkable paintings, Wind from the Sea.

“The room Wyeth had entered on that summer day was at attic bedroom in the family home of Christina and Alvaro Olson the the coast of Maine near Cushing.  Built on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, the house had once served as a beacon for ships, returning to harbor.  Long since fallen into disrepair, the clapboard structure was described by some as a ‘tinderbox.’  Christina, crippled by a degenerative muscle condition, had gradually lost the use of hier legs and was dependent upon her brother for aid.  She spent most of her time in the kitchen on the lower level.  Rooms on the upper floors were rarely used.

“Andrew Wyeth had met Christina and her brother eight years earlier, in July 1939, and had completed his first watercolor painting of their weathered home on the day they met.  Warmly received, he had returned each summer spending increasing periods of time sketching the house, Christina, and Alvara.  An empty room at the top of the stairs eventually became his private corner studio.”  Exhibition Catalogue, p. 6.

“In the spring of 1947, just weeks before he opened the window that would inspire Wind from the Sea, Wyeth had begun his first portrait of Christina in tempera–the medium he had come to favor for major works.  Christina is seen in profile seated in a doorway, her lower legs not visible, her hair blown by the same breeze that rustles the tall grass outside the door.  Illuminated by light cast through the doorway, she sits quietyly, intent upon a distant view.” Exhibition Catalogue, pgs. 6-8.

Christina’s World – Museumof Modern Art New York

“The following summer, in 1948, Wyeth created a second ‘portrait’ of Christina.  Titled simply Christina’s World, the painting was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York shortly after its completion.  Placed on public exhibition at the museum in December 1948, the painting soon became one of the best-known works in American art.

“Alvaro Olson died on Christmas Eve in 1967, Christina a short time later on January 27, 1968.  During the nearly thirty-year period that Wyeth visited the Olsons, he created hulndreds of drawings, watercolors, and tempera paintings of the house and of Christina and Alvaro.  For Wyeth, however, it was the image of the attic window with its billowing curtains that he deemed the most successful: ‘Of all my works at Olsons’ this seems to me to be the one that expresses a great deal without too much in it.’

“Wind from the Sea is a technically accomplished painting that testifies to the artist’s early master of the egg tempera medium.  Rich in personal symbolism, it is also a highly disciplined work.  Although painted at the Olson House and later described by Wyeth as a ‘portrait’ of Christina, the image itself contains no over reference to the site and no human figure.  First and foremeost, Wind from the Sea is a painting of a window, a shade, curtains, and a distant landscape.”

“Wyeth had included windows in a number of paintings completed prior to Wind from the Sea, but none of the earlier works approached the same level of complexity.  During a career that spanned seven decades, Wyeth created more than three hundred  paintings of windoes.  In works without human figures, he explored the visual complexities posed by the formal structure, reflective transparency, and rich symbolism of windows.  Wind from the Sea was his first fully realized exploration of the subject, and it came at a critical juncture in his career.”  Exhibition Catalogue , pgs. 8-11

“As was his practice throughout his career, Wyeth stripped his composition of all elelments–including figures–that he determined were extraneous to the essence of his subject.

“Wyeth’s window paintings offer clear visual evidence of a deeply thoughtful artist organizing complexity through simplification.   The surface realism of the paintings masks a creative process characterized by rigorous subtraction.   Getting to the essence was the goal–paring to the bone was the method. …

“Without the distraction of figural narrative, the abstract quality of his work is more readily apparent. ” Exhibition Catalogue, pgs. 2-3.

Looking Out, Looking In – Wyeth Exhibition Catalogue

Looking Out, Looking In by Nancy Anderson et al

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In – Exhibition Catalogue

I ordered my Exhibition Catalog for the Wyeth Exhibition early–so that I could get some idea of what was in store. After reviewing the book [216 pages], I want to encourage anyone near to visit the NGA before November 30, 2014, and to take advantage of this exhibit’s opportunity. Most of the paintings on view are from private collections and this is not a touring exhibition. In other words, this particular exhibit will only be gathered for this one showing. While I am also extremely excited about the other 4 art exhibits I’ll be seeing this year, they are all of paintings that have been included for many years in large galleries and museums and history books. Wyeth is a relatively new artist–compared to Degas, Cassatt, Matisse, and Thoulouse-Lautrec [the other artists I’ll see at other times]; and much of his work is still not out there — not at NGA, the Met, MoMA, etc. I feel fortunate that I’ll be in the right place at the right time for this event. If you cannot make it, consider buying Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In [the Exhibition Catalogue] from Amazon.

“One of Andrew Wyeth’s most important paintings, “Wind from the Sea” (1947), is also the artist’s first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. Wyeth returned to windows during the course of the next 60 years, producing more than 300 remarkable works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Absent from these spare, elegant, almost abstract paintings is the narrative element inevitably associated with Wyeth’s better-known figural compositions. In 2014 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, presents an exhibition of a select group of these deceptively realistic works, window paintings that are in truth skillfully manipulated compositions centering on the visual complexities posed by the transparency, beauty and formal structure of windows. In its exclusive focus on paintings without human subjects, this catalogue offers a new approach to Wyeth’s work and represents the first time that his non-figural works have been published as a group since the 1990s. The authors explore Wyeth’s fascination with windows–their formal structure and metaphorical complexity. In essays that address links with the poetry of Robert Frost and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and other artistic peers, the authors consider Wyeth’s statement that he was, in fact, an abstract painter.
American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) lived his entire life in his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his summer home in mid-coast Maine. His seven-decade career was spent painting the land and people that he knew and cared about. Renowned for his tempera “Christina’s World” (1948), Wyeth navigated between artistic representation and abstraction in a highly personal way.” Amazon

Andrew Wyeth Exhibition at NGA Washington D. C.

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

May 4 – November 30, 2014

“In the spring of 2009 the National Gallery of Art was given one of Andrew Wyeth’s most famous paintings, Wind from the Sea (1947). Completed early in the artist’s career, the painting captured the moment when an ocean breeze flowing through an open window gently lifted tattered curtains. During the course of the next sixty years, Wyeth returned repeatedly to the subject of windows, producing more than three hundred works on this theme. Spare and elegant, these paintings are free of the narrative element associated with the artist’s better-known figural compositions. The abstract qualities of his work are therefore more readily apparent, and Wyeth emerges as an artist deeply concerned with the visual complexities posed by the transparency, symbolism, and geometric structure of windows.

“Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In gathers together — for the first time — a
 select group of Wyeth’s images of windows.
 Included in the exhibition are watercolor 
studies quickly executed to capture a momentary impression as well as tempera paintings created over an extended period of distillation and simplification. The exhibition begins with Wind from the Sea and proceeds to galleries of images that reflect his extended study of windows at other sites of particular interest, including the Olson house in Maine, the Kuerner farm in Pennsylvania, and his own Brandywine studio.

“Once heralded for his virtuoso draughtmanship and poetic sensibility, Wyeth was later regarded by critics as an isolated, conservative figure out of step with his age. Believing that his work was misunderstood, he repeatedly described himself as an abstract painter and asserted that critics judged only the surface realism of his paintings, overlooking their underlying structure.

“After Andrew Wyeth died in January 2009, a reevaluation of his work began almost immediately. It is now apparent that Wyeth was, in fact, an artist as concerned with formal abstraction and existential darkness as were his contemporaries. He was a multifaceted artist who employed abstract pictorial devices — including the window grid — to help distill compositions to their core emotion: “You can have the technique and paint the object,” he said, but “it’s what’s inside you, the way you translate the object — and that’s pure emotion. I think most people get to my work through the backdoor. They’re attracted by the realism and sense the emotion and the abstraction — and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.”

The exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, will be seen only in Washington.

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2014/andrew-wyeth.html