Fact as Poetry

By ROBERT HUGHES

The house itself is strictest Wyeth: gabled white clapboard, severe and trim and sagging a little off plumb; country-craftsman geometry perched on a flat tongue of land at the sea's edge in Cushing, Me. It looks thrifty, and was; its owner bought it for $50 and trucked it to the site. Inside, the illusion of having entered one of the man's pictures multiplies. The ceilings are low, the furniture old and spartan, the rooms small, white and uncluttered. A lot of distinct air surrounds each object. Through the front window, one sees a lawn with an 18th century cannon pointed at the indifferent horizon.

And out the back, what? An aged dory, weathering silver among the four thousand blades of brown grass, each painted separately in egg tempera? In fact, no: a dark, secretive-looking Stutz Blackhawk, $38,500 worth of Republican Mafia dream-hearse with a Cadillac engine and custom-fitted luggage, polished like an immense eggplant. Frank Sinatra has one, Elvis Presley owns two; but this model, an engraved plate on the dashboard attests, was fabricated in Turin for Andrew Wyeth. "People expect me to get around in an oxcart," says the painter. "But this thing's pretty useful. I can drive it into the fields when the weather's cold, turn on the heater, and sit on the roof to do a watercolor with my legs hanging inside."

In a way the car is appropriate, for Wyeth, at 56, is one of America's most durable institutions. The audience for advanced art is, as Roy Lichtenstein once wryly observed, about as big as the audience for advanced chemistry. Wyeth's audience, however, runs into the millions. His infrequent exhibitions --the most recent of which is a retrospective organized by Art Historian Wanda M. Corn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco--jam the galleries with visitors; in the U.S. only Picasso can pull more crowds than Wyeth. The price of a Wyeth watercolor begins at about $20,000, and his minutely detailed tempera paintings, of which he manages to finish about two a year, are said to have gone past $100,000 apiece.

Nor is any American painter coated with a more adhesive legend: the salty country boy who never went to school and picked it all up in his father's studio; the brusque down-Easter with a Huck Finn smile who never went for that French art stuff and never once moved out of America. The weathered faces of Wyeth's favorite subjects --Christina Olson, Karl Kuerner or Ralph Cline, the veteran patriot with a skull like a parchment-covered round shot--have become nearly as familiar as Charlie Brown or Donald Duck. They are seen as icons of survival and indomitability, and their clipped-tongue rectitude evokes the silence of the bald eagle.

The landscape they inhabit resembles them. Dour, bare and snow-patched, with low horizons of brown hill or gray water, a wind incessantly prying at the boards of the creaky frame houses, it is the soil from which virtue is meant to grow; even the pumpkin on Wyeth's fence post, if pumpkins could vote, would have voted for Ike. "Wyeth country"--the Pennsylvania farm land around Chadds Ford, where he spends the winter, and the summer acreage in Maine--has become landscape as myth or monument by now, the American middlebrow's equivalent of Cezanne's Mont-Ste.-Victoire or Monet's lily ponds at Giverny.

Certainly, much of Wyeth's success flows from nostalgia. Many people would like to project themselves at first hand, exchanging--for half an hour --their self-cleaning ovens for the black, bulbous wood stove that squats in the Ericksons' kitchen, and their disaster-crammed TV screens for the lean prospect glimpsed from the Olsons' attic window. Small wonder, then, that Wyeth's critics have dismissed "the other Andy" (as one of them, thinking of Warhol, called him) as a fabulist, and his images as a sentimental mix of frontierland and Cold Comfort Farm. The objection is almost political.

Theatricality has been in Wyeth's marrow since childhood, and his paintings, when weak, rarely permit one to forget the atmosphere of lantern-lit masquerade in which his father, the profusely talented illustrator N.C. Wyeth, reveled. When swashbuckling or fantasticated, as in much of his work before the 1960s, that theatricality could make Wyeth seem as vulgar as Thomas Hart Benton--though much subtler in design and drawing.

Although Wyeth is sometimes described as a "realist," the term is misleading when applied to him; his images are not direct transcriptions of what he sees, unedited slices of life. There is always a great deal of compression, suppression and choice--sometimes, it is true, bending to sentimentality but in his best work at the service of an elusive poetry of mood. The painter would like to be invisible, to have his subjects treat him as if he were not there. "You see, I'm a secretive bastard. I wish I could paint without me existing, that just my hands were there." This is theater as concealment, rather than display--the obverse of N.C. Wyeth's costume dramas. And it connects to the secretive postures of Andrew Wyeth's human subjects, painted looking away or from the back. There is more to these poses than literary anecdote, though they dwindle to that when Wyeth's delicacy falters. But at his best, his images become hermetic, despite their apparent candor; a peavey or a hanging cornhusk seems to brim with undisclosed biography. When the elusiveness at the core of his imagination reacts with his virtuoso power of rendering the soberest nuance of light, texture and weight, Wyeth becomes a formidable artist.

A recent step in Wyeth's slow move away from anecdote is marked by a group of nudes. The model was a teenage girl named Siri Erickson, daughter of one of Wyeth's Finnish neighbors. "She had this immense vitality," says Wyeth. "I liked that directness. She's part of the country, planted in it, absolutely unselfconscious. Lipstick never entered her mind." He met her shortly after his favorite woman model (or character), Christina Olson, died. "Siri seemed like a bridge to me, or a new cycle; life coming out of death." The resulting pictures, done between 1968 and 1972, are among the solidest and least theatrical of Wyeth's work. They are also--to the extent that it is possible with naked flesh--puritanical pictures, chill in their contrasts of skin pallor and gloom, of skin against the resistant textures of grit, wood and opaque brown foliage. There is an edge of contrivance: Black Water, 1972, is much posed, and the profile of the body against its dark background is a trifle obvious as a metaphor of hills and undulant landscape. But in the best of these pictures, like The Sauna, 1968, and Indian Summer, 1970, laconic composition and reflective grasp of structure place this sturdy, blunt frame before us with a tender but remote specificity. Fact as poetry is becoming Wyeth's strength. . Robert Hughes

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