People

By Guy D. Garcia

No bones about it. Andrew Wyeth's realism has never been more clinical. Four years ago, he decided to celebrate his wife's 60th birthday by giving her a self-portrait. "I had just had a hip operation," he says, "and got interested in X rays." He ordered up one of his head, to go with the others provided by doctors. The resulting painting, unveiled to the public in the current issue of Connoisseur, shows the essential Wyeth gazing out to sea, clad in a naval jacket from the War of 1812. "I like skeletons," avers Wyeth, 67. "They're more enduring than the flesh that hangs on them." And how did Mrs. Wyeth regard her husband's nod to physical if not artistic mortality? "I just loved it," she says, adding that she recognized the subject immediately because "I just knew what his skull would look like." True love indeed is more than skin-deep.