American Realist

Andrew Wyeth is a puzzle to critics, but not to laymen. Conceding his extraordinary skill, some critics accuse him of fishing in a backwater; Wyeth's story. telling pictures have more in common with i Qth-than with 20th-century art. To laymen, who generally prefer the old-fashioned kind anyway, that does not matter a bit. What does matter is the plain fact that Wyeth's pictures make sense, call for no translation.

That puts the cognoscenti out of work. Ever since their turn-of-the-century brethren failed to gauge the force and direction of modern art, the critics, not to be caught again, have been resolutely seeking out new and strange varieties of painting to explain to the public. The modern-art bandwagon may never stop rolling, but Wyeth rolls blithely in another direction. And his back road may lead to a new turnpike.

This week Wyeth reached a resting place on his road. A ten-year retrospective show of his work opened in the Currier Gallery at Manchester, N.H., will soon move on to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. A single painting by Wyeth can look labored and precious; an exhibition the size of Manchester's shows the man's steadiness and growth. It is bound to increase his already formidable reputation. At 34, Wyeth ranks among the realest of living realists.

Rich Childhood. At the outset, things looked dark for him. A sickly, spindly boy, Andy Wyeth was taken out of first grade after three months, never went back. He learned, a little reluctantly, at home, still has trouble spelling simple words. During the long days when Andy's brother and three sisters were away at school, he mused, wandered and played with tin soldiers. Storms of illness and the chill rain of solitude slowly nurtured his imagination.

Another nurturing force was his father, N. C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth, whose illustrations for such books as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans lit the eyes of generations of children. "My father," Andy says fervently, "was big in his feeling and the way he lived. At Christmas he used to play Santa Claus with electric lights all over him and practically come down the chimney. His studio was like his painting, loaded with stuff--pistols, swords, chests."

Andy spent his twelfth year with cardboard, scissors and paint, making a miniature theater and players for a performance of Arthur Conan Doyle's 15th-Century romance The White Company. The show, staged singlehanded for the family, opened Pa Wyeth's eyes. "Tomorrow morning," he told Andy, "you're going to start studying. Come into the studio."

Like the Renaissance painters who served early apprenticeships, Andy had the incalculable advantage of learning his craft thoroughly while he was young. No new-fangled progressive, N. C. drilled him day after day in drawing until the youth knew how to report precisely the shape and feel of what he saw. An . ordinary pupil would have gotten bored and quit, but not an artist-in-the-making.

As his health improved, Andy interspersed his work in the studio with high jinks outdoors. In Chadds Ford, Pa. (his home town), Andy took up with a

Negro boy named Doodoo Lawrence and inducted him into a Robin Hood band. Costumed in green and armed with bows, they would swoop down on some rich squire (such as a boy carrying groceries home), rob him and eat his riches in the forest. In Port Clyde, Maine, where the family spent the summers, Andy found another native nonconformist. Together they learned to handle a dory in heavy surf and to loot lobstermen's pots at night.

Breathing Hill. By 24, Wyeth was on the road to fame. His draftsmanship was skillful and his watercolor landscapes (which look thin and sloppy compared with his later work) had been exhibited and sold out more than once in Manhattan. More important, he had found and married a striking brunette named Betsy James, the daughter of a summer neighbor, who had made up her mind to be a helpful wife. They built a summer place at Gushing, near Port Clyde, took over an old schoolhouse in Chadds Ford for winter living.

One day old N. C. paid them a visit, began telling Andy how to paint a head, finally took the brush out of his son's hand and began to show him his idea. Betsy stood furiously by for a while, then walked out and slammed the door so hard the plaster fell from the ceiling. Next day N. C. came to Betsy and said, "I've been watching you for five years and you're all right, young lady. The stage is yours." He never interfered with Andy's work again.

After his father died, Andy, who had never done a portrait of him, painted a picture of a boy running downhill. "For me," Andy says, "the bulges of that hill seem to be breathing--rising and falling --almost as if my father was underneath them."

Useful Yolk. Wyeth's sister Henriette (herself a portraitist) had married Painter Peter Hurd--a fast friend of Andy's. Together Peter and Andy explored the meticulous egg-tempera technique, painting with small brushes on panels, which suits them both perfectly. The technique was standard during the Renaissance, and Wyeth says that "so much hokum has been written about it you feel you have to be a chemist to start on a picture." Wyeth's method is simple: for each day's work he mixes the yolk of one egg with a little distilled water, makes a paste of his powdered pigments.

The great advantage of egg-tempera is its precision. Thin and fast-drying, it permits none of the slick tricks that oil does, but is fine for detail work and for unobtrusively creating a sense of light. The sky in Wyeth's Young America, for example, has more air than paint about it.

Young America took six months to paint. Wyeth got the idea for it when he saw a Chadds Ford boy coming down the street on a shiny new bicycle covered with gadgets. "Somehow he seemed to express a great deal about America," says Andy. "I thought to myself, 'Now he thinks his bicycle is wonderful, but in a year he'll earn enough to buy himself a car.' I was struck by the freedom he represented--by distances in this country, the plains of the Little Bighorn and Custer and Daniel Boone and a lot of other things. I was excited by the motion of the bicycle too. The moving wheels were one of the most difficult things I ever painted. I called it Young America because it expressed in a way the vastness of America and American history."

Great Tradition. Wyeth's instinct is to paint only what he knows well, which limits him to Pennsylvania and. Maine landscapes and to portraits of friends. His watercolor landscapes may take as little as 20 minutes -- after which he lies down exhausted. In them he shows something of Winslow Homer's eaglelike capacity for observing and seizing the beauties of nature. But Wyeth's reputation rests mainly on his carefully wrought temperas, which are in the great tradition of a igth-Century Pennsylvanian : Thomas Eakins. Wyeth's temperas are not yet in the same class with the master's oils -- Eakins put far more weight and space into his pictures and constructed them far more surely out of a greater diversity of elements -- but at 34 Wyeth is still growing.

A Crow Flew By is a telling example of his growth. Wyeth decided to paint it the day he called on the man in the picture and found him alone in his murky shack, leaning forward into the light. Wyeth made scores of sketches of the man, the room, the clothes on the wall, then painted from them. Typically, he began with the plaster wall, leaving blank spaces for the clothes and the figure. Then he painted in the clothes, and finally the man himself.

His Own Road. The title, Wyeth says, was an incidental afterthought, but it is appropriate. The figure has the wasted, weightless look of extreme age; it seems to lean on the air. The blue denim jacket gleams like plumage and the work-worn hands are talonlike. Composed in a passive spiral, the figure is crossed by a sword-sharp flick of light. Somehow -- > perhaps because it looks like the last touch of a setting sun -- the light brings darkness and death to mind.

A bleak, still, deathly quality pervades much of Wyeth's work, contrasts strangely with his warm nature. Possibly illness has left a deeper mark on his art than on the man. Possibly, too, he will one day paint the summer of life as convincingly as he now pictures its autumn.

"Nothing means anything to me except painting," Andy says. "I'm warped in that direction. I have a terrible urge. Once I get a good subject I'm happy, but I go through hell to get that subject. I've got to have a definite connection with it ... I think I'd probably commit suicide if I couldn't paint."

Crop-haired, thin and amiable as ever, Wyeth basked in the success of his retrospective show this week. Soon he would be struck by the subject for a new tempera, and begin the long, hard, solitary labor that each one means for him. Since painting is creating what never existed before, it always means working in the dark. But Wyeth's feet are firmly on his own road; he moves ahead.

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