The Preservationist

The pictures are solemn brown studies. Here and there, light flashes within them like electricity inside a summer thunderhead. At first glance, they are quiet paintings of commonplace subjects--familiar faces, weather-beaten buckets, battered stone walls and boulders -- with none of the candy-colored savor of pop culture or the treacle of lap dogs and firesides. Basically, An drew Wyeth paints his own backyard.

Yet to the careful observer his scenes crackle with an instant's discovery, the look that a mirror cannot capture, an insight that burrows beneath anatomy.

Snowfalls & Souls. Wyeth, the apparent realist, at 49 paints a world of his own. In a sense, it is a nostalgic world.

Machinery, for instance, rarely appears in his art; he even leaves out of his works the giant high-tension towers that march behind his rural house in Chadds Ford, Pa. More truly, it is made up of fungus, leaves, snowfalls and souls. It is full of tenderness; yet there is an awareness of death's deprivation. There is in it a tragic search for preservation.

Wyeth's largest retrospective show to date, 223 works, is currently on view in Philadelphia's 161-year-old Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.* At the opening, he received the academy's gold medal, the 36th winner in the train of artists like Winslow Homer, Whistler and Sargent, recalled: "I was twelve years old when my father first brought me to the academy, and I . . ." Then he could say no more and sat down.

Ageless, Endless. Recently, Wyeth has focused on portraits. His people are no longer elements of landscape, but Rembrandtesque, life-sized faces of those he knows well. As his subject matter has become increasingly human, his painterly light seems to glow within his subjects rather than wash them from the outside. Wyeth himself believes that two of his recent works (see opposite) are his finest portraits.

Maga's Daughter (1966) shows his wife, who is fond of crazy hats, wearing an 18th century Quaker skimmer. Says Andy: "It reminded me of those Early-American flatiron weather vanes." This work, unlike most, belongs to the artist's own collection--permanently. Since Betsy, an ebullient woman of 45, reminds the artist of her mother, he named the painting, which has the quality of universal womanhood, to encompass two generations.

Grape Wine portrays Wyeth's friend and handyman Willard Snowden. Since 1964, he has painted the wine-loving Negro drifter often in wistful poses suggestive of eternal human patience. Says Wyeth: "He gave me a chance to paint something timeless, ageless, endless. He's all of the Brandywine Valley, its dankness and brooding power."

* The exhibition travels in December to the Baltimore Museum of Art, then to New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.