Risk comes in varying degrees in the art world. Sometimes things that seem safe are quite perilous — and that is the case with any exhibit involving .
The public loves Wyeth, especially his famously evocative portraits of forlorn women, and the new retrospective of his work at the is likely to draw big crowds. I hope it does.
But anyone who goes should keep one analytical eye open, and one ear listening to the valid criticisms that dogged Wyeth his entire life and have continued after his death in 2009.
Was he a master painter or an uninspired realist? A prolific scene copier obsessed with detail, yet lacking in imagination? Was he sentimental or saccharine? Was he an independent thinker who ignored the modern art trends of his century or a man with outdated methods, repeating old tricks?
The challenge of “Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio” is to put us on the positive side of those three questions, and I’m not sure it does. You still come away moved more by Wyeth’s trademark moodiness than anything else. He’s a manipulator of emotions rather than a man of innovative, intellectual ideas. There’s a darkness in his palette — in the stares of the people he paints, the hues of his barren landscapes — and putting so many of his works together only magnifies the cinematic effects, making mystery seem like a go-to antic.
That this show also includes the work of his son Jamie, successful and talented in his own right, only adds to the sentimental tally.
But here is why it’s a genuine hit: Because curator has put together such a complete and winning picture of the elder artist himself, borrowing paintings from museums and private collections across the country. He includes those forlorn portraits, but doesn’t rely on them to get across Andrew Wyeth’s best talents. This isn’t a show of — those pictures Wyeth did late in his career, in secret, of model Helga Testorf that toured the country extensively and almost did in the artist’s legacy because of their melancholy excess.
What we are left with is Wyeth’s dedication — his commitment to portraying the world he lived in, the rural people around his farm, the seaside terrain at his Maine retreat. Wyeth labored his whole life trying to perfect his vision on canvas.
We are left with his Americanness. His grasp of the New World gothic may be exaggerated, but it serves as an effective recording of a certain era in history, matching in paint those same strained qualities that photographers , Walker Evans and Diane Arbus captured on film. His devotion to realism at a time when everything else was going abstract presents him as an iconoclast, a resister of current mania, a rebel.
And we are left with his brush, a most amazing thing. No American painter was more skilled than Wyeth or possessed a greater ability to make marks with his artist’s tools, or with tempera paint, or pencil or — and this is the revelation to most folks — watercolor.
Works such as “Roaring Reef” (1941) show the artist letting go of precision in that way that watercolor demands as it soaks into paper on its own accord. He clearly understands and exploits the medium. “Winter,” a watercolor and graphite piece from 1946, is a study for another work, and a hint at the process of an artist more interested in connecting closer to the soul than the head. It is murky and revealing. These are terrific inclusions on Standring’s part.
There are reasons to appreciate the portraits, though more reasons to stare at monumental landscapes, including 1953’s “Snow Flurries.” Wyeth has a stunning command of the chunkiness and flexibility of tempera paint, zooming in on tiny weeds and delicately touching out tufts of snow. It’s a barren place that he depicts, but it feels full of earthy grit.
While Wyeth opted out of the abstract regimen of his peers, you see he was influenced by the times. His perspective on the outdoor scene “The Hunter” (1943) — which gazes down on its subject from the top of a tree, through its gnarled branches — is that of a modernist, seeking new vantage points on the world around him.
Still, it is constrained in a way that feels out of sync within the broad generation that gave us Salvatore Dali, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. While Andrew Wyeth was painting Helga, Andy Warhol was churning out prints of Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli.
One wonders whether Wyeth had been born two centuries earlier, before art got weird, or two decades later, in the era of anything goes, if he would have escaped critic after critic railing on his conventional ways.
This was the great advantage for Jamie Wyeth, and one the son took full advantage of. Yes, he grew up on the family farm in Pennsylvania, and, no doubt, he was cultural royalty, with a lineage started by grandfather N.C. Wyeth, who made his fortune as a popular illustrator. For certain, he inherited the family’s spooky gene.
But Jamie is naturally looser, a freer spirit, an experimenter, who never looks stuck for a moment in this career retrospective. He actually comes off as ahead of his time, rather than behind it.
His most famous work, 1968’s “Portrait of Lady,” captures a lone sheep staring directly at the viewer. It’s full of detail, especially the animal’s woolly coat, yet imagination, too; this sheep has personality, and you wonder what it is thinking. It has PETA-level dignity.
Jamie Wyeth, now 69, spent the bulk of his career as a portraitist with an attitude, equally framing people and animals, and delving deep into the psychological essence of both. His choice to concentrate on oils allowed him a broader, brighter palette than his father’s. There are shocking yellows and bold oranges in his work.
He has his sentimental moments. His 1984 “Kleberg,” featuring a white dog with a black ring around one eye, gets dangerously close to a maudlin family tradition. But it’s composed in a such a way — the dog is off-center and gets equal billing with a large basket — that you don’t get overwhelmed by cutie-pie feelings. Instead, you explore what the artist is up to, what he wants you to understand about the scene.
Unlike his father, who was criticized for making the same gestures again and again, Jamie experiments as he matures. His “Seven Deadly Sins” series (2005-08) uses sea gulls — eating, sleeping, mating — to depict all that biblical badness. The series is real and abstract, and slightly threatening. It has Jamie’s trademark anatomical precision, but it’s open to interpretation: sacred, secular, sexual.
He’s an artist of his time, inviting us to speculate, to accept what’s real and imagine what’s not. The apple fell just far enough from the tree; he’s a Wyeth, but emerges as an individual.
In that way, Standring succeeds in drawing a line between father and son. DNA gave them both innate skills, and a confidence to do what they wanted, and both worked very hard, despite the fact that they had the money to just dabble. You sense a healthy combination of nature and nurture in the dynamic.
If this were a competition, neither would lose. They’d end up on the same side of a relay race that has lasted a full century. They helped each other’s credibility.
If there’s an effort in this exhibition to redeem Andrew Wyeth’s name in critical circles, then his accomplishments are clearly brought to life. He gave us compelling landscapes, and he gave us Jamie. Not a bad legacy after all.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or @rayrinaldi
WYETH: ANDREW AND JAMIE IN THE STUDIO The Denver Art Museum presents a retrospective of work by the father and son painters. Through Feb. 7. DAM, 100 W. 14th Ave. Tickets cost $16 for adults, $5 for youths 6-18. For more info, call 720-913-0130 or denverartmuseum.org.
