Wyeth's Cold Comfort

By ROBERT HUGHES

The exhibition of 300 paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth that opened last week at New York's Metropolitan Museum is bound to be successful. That, in the Met's eyes, means so jammed with people that the art will be virtually invisible. At 59, Wyeth is the most popular, perhaps the only popular "serious" artist in America. For the past 20 years his elaborately finished tempera paintings of the landscapes and neighbors around his winter farm in Pennsylvania and his summer house in Maine have become indistinguishable, for an enormous public, from a dream of vanished moral rectitude. Every split clapboard reveals the American grain; each shot deer and plucked blueberry suggests the frontier. The faces of Wyeth's cast of bucolic characters--the Kuerners in Pennsylvania, the Ericksons and Olsons in Maine --are almost as familiar, though less physiognomical, to his audience as those of Johnny Carson, Richard Nixon or Bugs Bunny. Moreover, everything is distinct. One gets every last blade of grass on the cold hill, delivered in low, muted colors that suggest a kind of flinty and puritan sincerity. Small wonder, then, that a large public considers Wyeth the Great American Artist--or that the opposition to him has been, in some quarters, as violent and irrational as the worship. For it is also the custom to attack Wyeth as a mere illustrator, dazzling the midcult beast with a mixture of sentimentality and cold manual tricks.

Inside the exhibition, one wonders what all the fuss has been about. Wyeth is clearly what used to be called a petit-maitre. He has staked out a small and somewhat predictable area of visual sensation, a narrow range of images, ideas and colors, and worked it so thoroughly as to exclude all followers. Some memorable works have resulted. The close and beautifully exact tonal painting of a landscape like Brown Swiss (1957)--"I wanted it to be almost like the tawny brown pelt of a Brown Swiss bull," he tells Met Director Thomas Hoving in the catalogue text--is not the work of small talent; and there are few American portraits that display such a stoic and irreducible density, pore by pore, as the bald head of The Finn (1969).

Embalmed with Paint. The detailed, stroked, sandpapered, flecked surface of Wyeth's tempera painting -- "weaving" is his own word for it --conveys an obsessive sense of scrutiny. "I really like tempera because it has a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness--almost a lonely feeling. There's something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest." Paint embalms the objects on Wyeth's cold-comfort farms; it stresses their distance from one another and from the eye. Combined with his fondness for large legible shapes and photographic cropping, it can produce arresting images.

The show's weakness is its monotony. Director Hoving, who was obliged to step in as his own guest curator when the Met's curator of 20th century art, Henry Geldzahler, refused to touch the show, has given Wyeth the kind of treatment that only major draftsmen merit. Each painting is surrounded by a flock of its studies and sketches that reveal the working method, the small adjustments, tunings and abstractions that come between the first view and the final painting. If Wyeth were Rubens the spectacle would be fascinating. But since he seems to work upward from illustration and his capable brisk notes are mostly unremarkable as drawing, the cumulative effect of all those little brown studies is numbing.

Starting with Jackson Pollock, one can easily think of a dozen modern American artists who have not had retrospectives at the Met but whose works possess richer cultural and historical meaning than Wyeth's. Why, then, the immense accolade? The reason is simply box office. The Metropolitan Museum hopes to make at least $2 million from the sales of Wyeth catalogues and souvenir reproductions alone. To ram the point home, a boutique has been set up at the show's exit, and visitors have no choice but to run the gauntlet. Hard sell Hoving strikes again; and one sees another small but distinct step in the Met's transformation from the greatest encyclopedic museum in America into a grandiose West Side extension of Bloomingdale's.

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