Wyeth the Youngest

Somebody Up There is not distributing the talent very evenly. While many an artist is going mad trying to make a loft and a set of oils stretch into a career, the Wyeth family of Chadds Ford, Pa., moves imperturbably into its third generation of artistic luster. A new show at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, lets viewers see the romantic illustrations of Grandfather N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), the universal evocations of Father Andrew (TIME cover, Dec. 27) and the prodigal realism of Andrew's son James, who is only 17.

At the opening of "Three Generations of Wyeths," Jamie looked like a top-form prep-school student taken by his parents to inspect the college. But he is unlike any other 17-year-old in the country. His consuming motive--uncluttered by any profound education or knowledge of the world outside of Chadds Ford--is to paint with realism, humanity and technical brilliance. Unless his fast start proves his undoing, he seems certain to succeed.

Burned Bridges. In the Wyeth clan, almost everybody paints but the dogs, and Jamie started early. Says he: "I'd come home from a movie and draw the characters in it." He quit school after the sixth grade, and goes to a tutor mornings. "It's really butting in, the schoolwork, I mean," says he. "I'm not going to college, of course. Leaving school is like burning all your bridges. But painting is purely individual; it may be the only profession where you can do this." Such dedicated talk does not mean that the lean youth with long fair locks is an isolated, inhibited child prodigy; he is, rather, the neighborhood swinger, who now zaps around in his second vermilion Corvette Sting Ray sports car, having cracked up the first last summer.*

Even more than his father, Jamie is drawn to local characters. At Swarthmore he shows a translucent, almost Flemish portrait of Lester, which suggests that everyman's mind, like the dumbest, claws at his own furthest limits of knowing the world. Another portrait is Shorty, which sets a stubble-faced recluse incongruously in a sleek green silk wingback chair. (Soon after the portrait was finished, Shorty burned to death in his shack.) An eerie vision of a Mushroom Picker in the subterranean farms of Pennsylvania casts the tiny fungus caps in an almost surreal drama of light and shadow.

Bore & Dig. "The object is definitely the most important thing to me," says Jamie. "In portraits I just wish I could drop myself out of it completely. It would be fantastic if you could just get a second person down on canvas without yourself in it," More, generally, he wants "to be involved in a little world, bore into it, dig into it and the hell with everything else."

*Speed is a Wyeth mania. On a moonless night last week after a dinner party, Andy, barefoot, and his wife Betsy, in an evening dress and sneakers, high-spiritedly tried out a pair of newly bought motorbikes, collided headon. Wyeth broke some foot bones; Betsy was sent to the hospital with a concussion.

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