By Victor Greto
CHADDS FORD, Pa. – It’s just another painting, the latest of hundreds, thousands that the 90-year-old master produced in a career that stretched over more than seven decades.
Then again, “just another painting” doesn’t sell for seven figures soon after it’s completed, does it?
But forget about the money paid to acquire “Goose Step” – Andrew Wyeth’s latest painting, which made a brief appearance at the Brandywine River Museum before being gobbled up by its new, publicly unknown, owner – even if it is the vague but glittering news from which this ocher-colored tale hangs.
If you had the luck to look long and hard at Goose Step, the 7-by-5-foot work done in the exacting medium of egg tempera, of a goose stepping from rushing water toward a calm tributary with the muted colors of the Brandywine Valley yawning calmly behind it, you may have seen more than you thought.
“His work is getting finer and finer,” says his son, Jamie. “I have hope for myself at age 90. The misnomer of Andrew Wyeth is he’s a realist. It’s a peak into his own world that he creates, and it’s not so much reality.”
Call it reality with an edge.
“He almost always manipulates the landscape for the sake of composition, and for the sake of confronting the world as he wants you to see it,” says Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum.
And half the time it’s of the same landscape, just outside his back door in Chadds Ford.
At least it’s that landscape when he lives at his home here, during the fall and winter. He spends the spring and summer months in Maine.
“Thoreau never got tired of Walden Pond,” Duff says. “Every moment he saw it, it was different than any other moment. Andrew Wyeth finds any place to which he’s attached compelling, changing and rewarding.”
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Andrew Wyeth’s iconic Americana paintings, from Christina’s World and the 240 Helga paintings he created between 1971 and 1985 to “Goose Step,” have helped define 20th-century American art.
There are themes that resonate through most if not all of his paintings, whether they are portraits or landscapes, watercolors or drawings.
Much of Wyeth’s work expresses a chilling loneliness, paradoxically emoted through a dispassionate eye that looks as evenly at cruelty as it hints at hope.
Think of his most famous painting, 1948’s Christina’s World (owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York), of a young woman crawling in an open field toward a distant farm house.
Or, 1958’s Raccoon (owned by the Brandywine River Museum), a portrait of “Jack,” a raccoon-hunting hound chained up by the owner of Brinton’s Mill, an animal that was eventually killed by its owner months before the Wyeths bought the place later that year.
Think twice before calling either of these paintings sentimental, despite the nasty reputation many landscapes or paintings of animals have of betokening that too-often maudlin emotion.
“He’s a metaphoric realist,” says Joyce Hill Stoner, professor and paintings conservator at the Winterthur and University of Delaware program in art conservation.
“Embedded in each painting is a buried treasure of emotions that can be picked out by the viewer,” she says. “There are multiple meanings. It’s what I love about his painting.”
The landscape, an essential ingredient in the Brandywine River school of painting, goes back to the tradition’s 19th-century forebear or godfather, Howard Pyle, and continues in the illustrations of N.C. Wyeth, Andrew’s father, through Andrew and on to Jamie, Andrew’s son.
For decades the acknowledged exemplar of this school of art has been Andrew, whose plethora of watercolors, drawings and egg tempera works dominate both the Brandywine River Museum, which houses many of the school’s works, and the art world’s view of the region.
Andrew Wyeth was born the youngest of five children in 1917 to illustrator and artist N. C. Wyeth, who tutored him at home in both art history and his love for the history and beauty of the Brandywine Valley.
The Wyeth family arrived in America more than a century before the American Revolution, but N.C.’s and Andrew’s interpretations of the landscape and the river – as with N.C.’s teacher, Howard Pyle – are profoundly informed by that history.
Andrew Wyeth officially launched his career 71 years ago, at the age of 20, when he held his first exhibition of watercolors in New York City. They sold out.
At about the same time, he began working in egg tempera, a process that uses egg yolk to bind pigments, and reveals a greater illusion of realism than oil painting. It allows the artist to layer and mingle coats of paint so he can build his subjects from the inside out.
Andrew may have turned to egg tempera partly to distinguish himself from both his father and Pyle, both of whom worked in oil. In turn, Jamie utilizes mixed media for many of his works, including oil, pencil and watercolor and varnish.
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Egg tempera suits Andrew Wyeth’s passion for detailed emotion.
“You can look at the same object in all times of day or in your imagination with the myriad shifts of tones,” Andrew Wyeth has said. “It’s like Rembrandt painting his own face as many times as he did….If I can get beyond the subject to the object, then it has a deeper meaning….I can never get close enough to an object, or inside of it enough.”
Frolic Weymouth, whose egg tempera works also show his subjects in measured detail, sees the potential of redoing scenes as symptomatic of Wyeth’s inexhaustible brilliance.
“It’s his genius, his ability to see something unique and beautiful in simple things around him,” he says. “I dare you to find something that’s a repeat.”
For the artist, understanding the essence of a scene is to see it in the right light, at just the right time of day, or when the artist is in the right frame of mind.
“A great artist reproduces what he sees through the mist of his own consciousness and personality,” says Stoner, who also is on the board of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. “It’s filtered, and he’s showing you his interpretation of the scene.”
This “inspiration” has to be earned, Stoner says. It’s part of a work ethic that Pyle taught Andrew’s father.
“Part of the Brandywine school is that Pyle believed and taught N.C. who taught Andrew that every day you go and paint and don’t wait to be inspired,” she says. “They get up, as if they were loggers going into the forest, and paint. Sometimes it’s wonderful, and sometimes they’ll tear it up.”
It’s a learned discipline, Jamie Wyeth says.
“It started with my grandfather. You drive yourself because you’re not always inspired. It’s become my vocabulary. By constantly working at it, you evolve it into something interesting.”
An artist dependent on some ethereal inspiration may wait forever, Weymouth says.
“Sure, you’re inspired when you see something,” he says. “But you can walk by something a hundred times before you see it in the right light, or see the right log floating down a river, and then you try to get it down. It’s not a question of inspiration.”
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One of the seminal moments in Andrew Wyeth’s personal and artistic life occurred with the violent death of his father and 3-year-old nephew, when his car stalled on railroad tracks in October 1945 and was struck by a train.
Only five years after his marriage to Betsy James, and around the time of the births of his two sons, Nicholas in 1943, and Jamie in 1946, the event changed his life and his work.
By the mid-1940s, in part at the urging of his wife who disdained the bright watercolors he used in his early work, Wyeth’s paintings became charged with muted colors, a deeper realism, and what Stoner calls an underlying sadness and embedded symbolic emotion.
“He never painted his father during his lifetime, and he never stopped painting his father after he died,” she says.
Metaphors of his father seep through much of his work, including his repeated rendering of nearby Kuerner’s Hill – “where N.C. was killed,” Stoner says. “His father was such a mountain of a man. That’s one of the reasons why the earth is so important to him.”
Stoner sees Wyeth’s post World War II work as a strong counterpoint to the abstract expressionism and pop art that became the rage in New York City.
Still, Wyeth utilizes “micro” abstract expressionism in his rendering of grass and water, she says, and his realism is tempered by the effect of his painting on the viewer.
Eight years ago, Stoner helped restore Raccoon, which had been damaged by scratches. Wyeth came to the conservatory to help.
Behind the chained dog is a scarred, stone wall, which reflects the pain of the animal’s situation. Wyeth told her he wanted some (but not all) of the accidental scratches to remain on the wall.
“One of the things that’s wonderful is he is not a photo realist, he’s a metaphoric realist,” Stoner says. “He embraces accidents. He’s far closer to abstract expressionists than people think.”
In his father’s work, Jamie says, the painting’s realism is invariably tempered by his emotions.
“It’s his curious point of view,” he says. “The color isn’t that accurate to what’s there. In this airless world, everything is sharply defined, both distance and close-up is sharp. The human eye doesn’t see that. He does. It’s kind of disturbing.”
In 1958, the Wyeths bought and began to restore the old mill where he had painted the dog. It appears repeatedly in his work, including Goose Step.
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In his latest painting – which is not allowed to be reproduced until it is officially published by the Wyeth Foundation – all the colors of Wyeth’s mature work are there, from stark white to muted browns, golds, ochers and blacks. They dapple and infiltrate the landscape, from the dam-created fury of the waterfall to the spears of dead grass in the foreground and the nearly barren beech trees in the background.
All those different grades of colors come together in the white and tawny, earthy ocher and black of the goose.
“You get an incredible feeling of the realization of being near a waterfall, the excitement of the water flowing at you, the dichotomy of the calmness of the goose walking across, and the violence behind,” Weymouth says. “Like life.”
To achieve such a feeling Wyeth uses both watercolor and egg tempera in new ways, Stoner says.
“Tempera is done in tiny brushstrokes and built up slowly, and he will sometimes do that, like when he’s doing grass,” she explains. “Then he will sometimes use it like watercolor and splash it and make it transparent. In Goose Step, he does a 21st-century version of tempera: We have these wonderful falls burbling at us, and he’s swooshed and swashed it around like he would in watercolor.”
To the right and north of the picture’s center suddenly springs a verdant green, the only color in the work that is not seen on the goose.
“There’s always in his work the possibility of spring and rebirth,” Duff says. “It’s a sense there’s something positive happening, but it’s beyond your reach because it hasn’t happened yet.”
Like the woman gazing at the cottage beyond her reach in Christina’s World; or the dog’s noble stance against its imminent death in Raccoon.
For Jamie Wyeth, to watch his father paint is like watching a man battle with himself and nature.
“If you ever watched him work, he throws paint all around,” Jamie says. “He starts wild. That’s why he continues to work in water color, but refines it in tempera.”
If creating art is in part the ability to translate the complexity of life into understandable form, Wyeth’s method of painting does just that, Weymouth says.
“The excitement of what’s there is confusing,” he says. “You may see it only once. You may be just taking a walk one day and see this incredible light and the river coming down. He does the watercolor first, then chooses to do tempera, which is often done in the studio.”
Richard Meryman describes Wyeth’s passionate method of working in his 1996 biography, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life.
“Every watercolor has been like a battle, the outcome constantly in doubt,” Meryman wrote. “His breath fast, talking to himself, the glasses he wears paint-spattered with color, he attacks the paper with a frenzy, scratching it with the end of his brush, scraping it with a razor blade, dabbing at it with Kleenex.”
Wyeth often creates dozens of drawings and watercolors before he realizes an egg tempera painting, Stoner says.
Wyeth paints up to four egg tempera works during a year (two in Maine, two in Chadds Ford), and creates from up to two to four watercolors and drawings a day, she says.
“Some may not see the light of day, but that’s how much he works,” she says.
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His output changed for 15 years, between 1971 and 1985, when Wyeth painted 240 pictures of Helga Testorf, a neighbor, without the knowledge of either his wife or Helga’s husband.
Because his wife catalogs everything he does, Wyeth chose to do the Helga pictures, many of her naked, in secret, but continued his average output.
Wyeth never wants anyone to know what he’s painting, Stoner says, and in his book Meryman argues that when he started painting a model named Siri Erickson in the nude (that’s her in his famous 1970 painting, Indian Summer), his wife told him she didn’t want to know about it.
So he didn’t tell her about Helga, and planned on revealing the paintings only after his death.
But after 15 years, because several others came to know about the Helga work and he did not want his wife to be hurt, he finally came clean.
The revelation of the Helga pictures is perhaps the most public moment in Wyeth’s artistic career, garnering a Time Magazine cover and a constant media presence in Chadds Ford for weeks.
But now that more than two decades have passed, and he is still producing art, it has receded into just another chapter in his long life.
His father’s depth is a result of Andrew Wyeth’s inner turmoil, Jamie says.
“It’s his psychological makeup,” he says. “It saves the work from being cute, makes it more timeless, and it touches people.”
Touches them so much that even his home has become a kind of relic, a place to take a pilgrimage.
“I’ve taken people to places where he’s painted, and they fall on their knees so they can touch the ground,” Stoner says. “That’s magic.”