Presidential Choice

No other artist has been so honored. Beyond all precedent, Richard Nixon is giving Painter Andrew Wyeth a one-man show in the nation's grandest gallery--the White House. To celebrate the event, Nixon is holding a formal banquet in honor of the Wyeths, topped by a reception at which the 200-odd guests will be entertained by Pianist Rudolf Serkin in the white and gold splendors of the East Room, where 22 of Wyeth's paintings will be on display. In the Nixonian view, artists in the past have been invited to the White House, as it were, to sing for their supper at a party for someone else. Under the new dispensation, the supper will be given to honor the artist himself. Nixon gave Duke Ellington a 70th birthday party last spring, more recently invited Comedian Red Skelton to inaugurate a series of "Evenings at the White House." The Wyeth show and dinner were Nixon's own suggestion, and nobody else's.

Why Wyeth? The two men have long been mutual admirers. But Wyeth has been a favorite of Presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson, and John F. Kennedy picked him as the first painter to receive the Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award. Wyeth is also popular with Middle Americans, partly because of his meticulous realism. But the somber, empty America that he depicts is a long way removed from the Chamber of Commerce optimism that is often (and mistakenly) assumed to be the sum total of Middle America's taste. Wyeth's America is often locked in a wintry cold, but even in summer the sun seldom shines full strength on the lonely fishermen, hired men and country women who inhabit it. They are stolid, they endure, but they are closer to Hawthorne's withdrawn New Englanders or the overworked pioneers of Willa Cather's Midwest than to the comfortable, free-living suburbanites of today's affluent society. Perhaps they recall, to Presidents as well as to ordinary people, the bitter hard work that went into making a nation.

Delicate Strokes. Wyeth's latest painting, My Young Friend, finished just in time for the White House exhibition, is a portrait of "Sissy" Spruance, a shy 20-year-old who works as a stable girl on a farm near Wyeth's home in Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley. "One day I spotted her riding bareback over the meadow, her braided hair flying and those two long strands falling over her face," recalls Wyeth. "She was wearing that raccoon hat as I have never seen any girl wear a hat --as if it were on an animal, not a human." The final inspiration came half a year later when he was dining with his wife at the local hotel. He looked up to see Sissy smiling in at him through the window. "She was looking directly at me with this strange, shy, quizzical expression. That look! That face! It snapped with me."

The picture took six weeks to complete, from the first ink drawing on a gesso-covered wood panel to the final delicate strokes of ocher tempera. The result is a memorable portrait of a girl with a look--wary, contained, but challenging--that speaks of the courage and the ordeal of those who, in Frost's phrase, have taken the road "less traveled by."

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