© BRUCE WEBER, ALL RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS RESERVED
ANDREW WYETH
12 july 1917 . 16 january 2009
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
VOL. 155, NO. 1, MARCH 2011
biographical memoirs
A
NDREW WYETH enjoyed undermining the stuffiness of formal occasions. At the White House in 2007, when he received
the third of his trifecta of national art medals, he hugged
President George W. Bush, clapped him on the back, laughed, and said,
“Mr. President, we have something in common: the critics don’t like either one of us!” In 2002 at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, upon receiving the twenty-second of his twenty-three honorary degrees, Wyeth
went up to the podium and said, “I’m speechless,” and demonstrated
by promptly sitting down again. In the 1970s, wearing only socks, he
and his niece “streaked” through the room during a formal party. He
painted profoundly serious paintings juxtaposing mortality with the
vitality of life, but would have been disappointed with an overly solemn
eulogy.
Andy (as he had us all address him) was the last of five children
born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to illustrator N. C. Wyeth, a largerthan-life father who immersed his brood in his passions for art, music,
history, and nature. N. C. devoted a significant proportion of his adult
life to their upbringing, arranging formal studio art classes, costumed
and play-acted holidays, adventure games, and regular family outings
to tune the imagination. Whenever I read or heard about N. C. Wyeth’s
all-out parenting, I felt totally inadequate as a mother. Three of his five
children became professional artists, and the other two excelled in music or patents for the DuPont Company. Worrying over Andy’s frail
health, N. C. had taken him out of school to be tutored at home when
he was only six. Andy loved to tell the story of receiving an honorary
doctorate from Harvard in 1955, being asked by the university president what college he had attended, and surprising him with “Oh, I left
school after the first grade!” However, like many autodidacts, Andy
was an avid reader, especially of biographies, and had surprisingly
broad knowledge of history and current events. Once when I mentioned
during the cocktail hour that I was treating a painting of Major John
André, Andy gave a complete and accurate impromptu lecture on André, Benedict Arnold, and George Washington.
At the age of twenty, Andy had a one-man show of his watercolors
at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City and worried about how the
works would fare during the Depression. However, by the end of the
second day all twenty-three paintings had sold. He was, of course, ecstatic, but his father was now jealous of his protégé, writing to Andy’s
sister Henriette, “What magical power that boy has! I am at once stimulated beyond words to new, purer effort, and plunged into black despair.” Andy loved this overpowering father, but also needed to escape
his influence on occasion; he developed early his ability to slip away mysteriously and often referred to himself as the “damned elusive [Scarlet]
[ 122 ]
andrew wyeth
123
Pimpernel.” He never felt obliged to account for his whereabouts to anyone, and he would contradict a story he told yesterday with no apology.
Andy’s early watercolors are alive with color, light, and splash. They
radiate vitality and excitement with the sky, clouds, water, seaweed,
and mussels. He kept the splash and dash throughout his life, but his
colors became more muted after he married eighteen-year-old Betsy
James in 1940. He credited the young Betsy with inspiring him to remove “corny colors” from his watercolors. For the next seventy years,
he created two huge bodies of work based largely on umber and ochre
earth colors: freely painted watercolors (often several a day) that visibly harnessed accidents vs. meticulously layered egg tempera on panels
(usually two to four a year). He used both media in his two different
worlds: Chadds Ford and near Cushing, Maine. He allowed the variously textured papers beneath his watercolors to ripple however they
might, but worked against the restraint of unyielding panels to build
up minute brush strokes of pigment and egg, almost weaving patterns
to represent grasses and fabrics in landscapes and portraits. He loved
the romances of Errol Flynn and Robin Hood; he had been taught to
fence by his swashbuckling brother-in-law Peter Hurd. Both the watercolor papers and the tempera paints show cuts and slashes from his
brush handles, wielded like fencing tools. (And even at ninety-one he
continued to wear Errol-Flynn-like costumes with doublets and stretch
pants when he visited my paintings conservation studio at Winterthur.)
The careful temperas may appear precise, but they also have underlying
free washes and sometimes splatters to create snow or splashing water.
His energetic watercolors and still, airless temperas seem almost to
have been painted by two different artists, but they are different sides
of the same man juxtaposing the emotions of the transient and the eternal. Andy associated tempera as a medium with dryness and death. He
compared its quality to “a cocoon-like feeling of dry lostness—almost a
lonely feeling,” “an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive, or hornet’s
nest.” He compared the building of tempera layers to woven textiles,
Betsy’s knitting, tapestry, or the evolution of the earth itself.
Mortality is omnipresent in these built-up earth-colored temperas.
He never painted his father, who was killed suddenly when his car was
hit by a train in 1945. But the ghost of his father haunts his images
metaphorically as a breathing mountain or a sleeping corpse. The family had a fascination with death and mortality or sleep as a metaphor
for death, and many of Andy’s landscapes contain the stilled corpses of
deer or birds. He painted many of his close friends on metaphoric
deathbeds: a frozen field or a floating dory. When his last sibling, Ann
Wyeth McCoy, died in 2005, Andrew buttoned his sketchpad beneath
his coat while visiting the funeral home and secretly painted Ann’s head
lying on a pillow as if sleeping.
124
biographical memoirs
Empathetic viewers pick up readily on the buried emotions and the
dry lostness in the temperas. Andy’s famous tempera Christina’s World
at the Museum of Modern Art shows the crippled Christina Olson in
the field looking up at her home in Cushing, Maine, a house now open
to visitors through the Farnsworth Art Museum. A visit to the actual
Olson House reaffirms the surrealistic, dry, dusty, lonely feeling Andy
saw as inherent in the tempera medium. The house has been preserved
(largely thanks to Betsy Wyeth) with distressed surfaces of torn faded
wallpaper, cracked grainy plaster, and worn wood grain floors on which
sharp geometric boxes of sunlight and shadow are projected through
the windows. Reproductions of the Wyeth paintings related to each
room are on display; this also provides a lesson in how Andrew Wyeth
re-constructed and simplified what might be taken for mere “reality.”
Comments in the Olson House guest book reflect the Wyeth-Olson
spell. Visitors write of such things as feeling that their dust is now mingled with the dust of the Olsons and the dust of Andrew Wyeth. Andy
chose to be buried next to Christina Olson in Cushing.
The Olson House comment books demonstrate why many refer to
Andrew Wyeth as “America’s best-loved painter.” I have read through
more than ten years of these collected comment books. Visitors cited
their contact with Wyeth paintings and this fairly modest historic house
as highlights of their lives. Return visitors have been engaged or married in the house, made commemorative quilts, and brought friends and
family members back to commune with the “ghosts” of Christina and
Alvaro Olson, people they had met only through Andy’s paintings. Visitors brag about the distances they have traveled—from cities all over the
U.S. in addition to Asia, Europe, Australia, and South America. Lengthy
responses are written in French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Chinese.
The handwriting styles range from childish scrawls to shaky elderly
hands. Both adults and children have drawn pictures into the book and
have told how their own art has been inspired by Wyeth’s works. Disabled visitors or their family members describe the comfort they derived from visiting the house or seeing the paintings. Janice Kasper, the
Olson House curator, told me that one visitor threw aside her crutches
to crawl about and view the house and grounds “as Christina did.” Life
Magazine in March 1997 called the Olson House “America’s Lourdes.”
Andy’s ability to communicate directly to his viewers without the
intercession of critics and curators may have irritated some in the art
establishment, but it remains palpable. Following his father’s sudden and violent death in 1945, Andy painted Winter 1946, a vicarious
self-portrait of a lost boy running down a dry, brown hill. When this
painting was on view in a traveling exhibition in Russia, Andy’s biographer Richard Meryman went up to a young Russian girl who was
crying in front of it and spoke with her through an interpreter. She said
andrew wyeth
125
she knew just how the boy felt, a terrible feeling of loss. After the sudden and violent events of September 11, 2001, Museum News, the journal of the American Association of Museums, needed a cover image for
its aftermath issue, “Where Do We Go from Here?” It chose Winter
1946 to express the nation’s shock and sorrow.
Why, as Andy had laughed loudly with George W. Bush in 2007,
did the critics dislike him so? He had been the darling of the media
until the 1960s, admired for his technical brilliance, expressive paintings, and record prices for a living artist. He had received multiple prestigious awards and appointments, and his paintings were purchased by
major museums. In 1948, he and Jackson Pollock were seen as the
peacefully co-existing poles of American art. But two decades later his
works were denigrated as narrow and outdated by the majority of art
critics who supported abstract expressionism and pop, minimal, and
conceptual art. He was rural, and they were urban. He showed emotion and sincerity, and they showed ironic distance. He didn’t participate in the New York gallery scene. His collectors and audiences were
labeled as unenlightened low-brow philistines. In 1977, the late art historian Robert Rosenblum summed up the acclaim-acrimony dichotomy
by naming Wyeth both the “most overrated” and the “most underrated” American artist of the century. The critics at last began to realize
their powerlessness; Calvin Tomkins wrote in the New Yorker in 1998
that “critics have grown weary of stamping on this critic-proof reputation.” Luckily, Andy lived long enough to see the reversals afoot in the
twenty-first century, as younger art historians have begun to challenge
the opinions of their predecessors. At least one California collector sold
his abstract paintings, which he said had become “wallpaper,” in order
to buy a Wyeth. The collector said he could return many times to the
Wyeth painting and find new meanings at each viewing.
I first met Andrew Wyeth in 1997, while preparing an essay on the
genealogy of the Wyeth family techniques—how his works reflected
approaches and materials used by his father’s teacher, Howard Pyle,
while the paintings of his artist son, Jamie, contained more echoes of
the rich oil technique of N. C. Wyeth. To prepare for a formal interview, I visited nearby museums and collections and studied his paintings
up close. I had been taught art history in the 1960s by an art-historical
establishment that had dismissed Wyeth’s work completely, but I was
now entranced with what I saw. I found that there were also two worlds
of “looking” at Wyeth’s paintings: very closely, to see the tiny, precise
lines on the kind-and-cruel face of Karl Kuerner, the gem-like landscapes,
or tiny birds in the backgrounds; and from far away, in order to see the
strong, bold abstract compositional shapes and tilted perspectives.
Wyeth had learned from his father and Howard Pyle that “a lay-in
should kill at a hundred yards.” Another marvelous revelation was the
126
biographical memoirs
light in Wyeth’s paintings, coming in from windows or cast by moonlight. I was retroactively furious with my former professors because
they had allowed the fashionable bias of the time to imprison their
judgment. While viewing the paintings at the major museums, I heard
the curators of paintings try to outdo one another making snide comments about the Wyeth paintings on easels; yet the curators of manuscripts or Asian art came by, really looked at the paintings, and without
bias said, “This is beautiful! Who painted this?”
At their ritual evening drinks from five to six at the mill house home
in Chadds Ford, Betsy Wyeth referred to the new critical climate of the
twenty-first century as a “sea change.” Andy and Betsy were inured to
the critical acrimony and could joke about it—to a degree. Andy told
me that he went up to at least one of the most vicious critics, who had
also attacked paintings by his son Jamie, at a museum event and genially offered a handshake. (What happened next has varied with the
telling, as many Wyeth anecdotes have been known to do.) The Wyeth
family has been devoted to art as the family business for at least three
generations and has learned to weather attacks and circle the wagons if
necessary. The criticism they value the most is the criticism they get from
each other. Betsy replaced N. C. as her husband’s dynamic sounding
board for his art; for seventy years she posed, provided comments on
most of his works, and collaborated on the choice of titles and frames,
and she continues to head the compilation of his catalogue raisonné.
Betsy was such an able and obsessive cataloguer of sketches, watercolors, and temperas that their son Jamie joked that when his father
died he’d be put in a drawer with a catalogue number tied to his toe.
However, as he had once done to escape the control of his father, Andy
would resist Betsy’s surveillance by hiding some of his works from her,
rarely admitting her to the studio, and eventually creating in secret
more than two hundred sketches, watercolors, and temperas of Helga
Testorf, a Chadds Ford neighbor who had been caring for Karl Kuerner, another German friend and regular model. There was a further
critical backlash against the Helga paintings and the attendant media
hype. Andy was highly amused that there was so much fascination with
whether or not there had also been a secret affair afoot and mused to
me that perhaps the public felt he was their country poet, like Robert
Frost, and shouldn’t even have had such thoughts. (Of course it later
emerged that Frost also had a rather active secret life.) Helga, who is a
homeopathic nurse, poet, and painter, stayed on to serve as Andy’s
studio assistant, chauffeur, nurse, masseuse, and occasional model for
the last two decades of his life, and reportedly gave him the Heimlich
maneuver on at least two crucial occasions. Andy’s sister Ann credited
Helga with keeping Andy alive past all expectations.
andrew wyeth
127
I had been nervous in August 1997 when I arrived in Maine to interview Andrew Wyeth. I had read the Meryman biography and was
hesitant about meeting such a famous elderly man who was also known
to be a prankster. But I was instantly charmed, as I soon learned most
people were. He clearly had remarkable antennae, perhaps from sixty
years of observing and interviewing his sitters, and a devilish sense of
fun. I was also taken aback that an eighty-year-old man could be so
sexy. I mentioned this at a formal party of important museum donors
about a week later and was startled yet again when a mature and notable lady winked and said, “Take a number, girl!”
The Wyeth family members put newcomers through a series of tests
masked as normal social interactions; I apparently passed and a few
months later became Andy’s paintings conservator, treating paintings
he had painted that had been scratched or damaged or treating paintings by Howard Pyle or N. C. Wyeth that he and Betsy were planning
to give each other for an upcoming birthday or holiday. He would visit
my paintings conservation studio during the treatments and sometimes
tell me not to retouch a certain scratch—that it made a stone wall more
realistic. On one such visit he patted my shoulder-length reddish-blonde
hair and said he liked my hair, and could he paint me? I never strayed
far from my phone for weeks after that, waiting for the follow-up call
(and learned that this could be another ploy—some potential models
never heard from him again). I would think of reasons to visit him and
Betsy at their mill house home with questions about works I was treating, and at last he followed up on his suggestion. Anna Kuerner, another longtime model, had just died, and Betsy presented me with her
pink raincoat. I put it on; it fit, and Andy grabbed my hand and said,
“C’mon,” and took me over to the nearby granary studio and began a
beautiful pencil drawing of my face and shoulders with the pink coat
that he then turned into a vibrant watercolor over three sittings in May
1999. It is every conservator’s dream to be able to watch and learn about
a living artist’s techniques, but he carefully posed me looking away; I
would have to try to catch furtive glimpses of what he was doing without jeopardizing the project. Word was out that if things weren’t going
well, he might shut the sketchpad and say, “Let’s go to lunch,” and
you’d never hear from him again—either the painting was abandoned
completely, or it was finished and you wouldn’t know until you saw it on
exhibition somewhere. The subjects of his in-progress paintings were
always closely guarded secrets, and part of my continuing test was my
discretion—about posing or about the paintings I was treating.
While you posed for Andrew Wyeth, he talked to you continuously,
and you became part of his world. He took you along for visits or lunches
with his friends, new exhibitions of his work or the work of others, tours
of places he had painted; it was a heady experience to suddenly have this
128
biographical memoirs
amazing quixotic talent focusing like a lighthouse beam on YOU. And
then it is over; he folds up his sketchpad and moves on. I had heard
from Jimmy Lynch, a rebellious James Dean type who had posed for
Andy a number of times, that he and other models were often plunged
into a post-posing depression. Even Denzel, a white horse Andy had
painted on the Kuerner farm, who would trot up to pose when he arrived in his van with paint box, stood longingly at the fence watching
passing cars after the sessions ended. I sympathized with Denzel.
However, I continued as his conservator for a decade, sometimes
carrying out joint treatments with him on paintings with missing areas,
or working in Maine on a wall mural of an eagle while he actually
painted a major tempera nearby. I never knew the subject matter until
the painting was ready to be shown, but I should have suspected the
content—he fixed me daily lobster sandwiches. We were eating his
models. During that summer, I was the proverbial “fly on the wall,” answered his phone, and met a number of past models who returned to
visit. I learned that he took care of those who were sick or needed a little monetary help. I also learned how quickly he could disappear out of
side doors without notice; as a result I was a dismal receptionist.
Andy relished his evasiveness, as in Leslie Howard’s portrayal of
the Scarlet Pimpernel: “They seek him here, they seek him there. . . . Is
he in heaven or is he in hell? That [damned] elusive Pimpernel.” Some
of his signatures were hidden in the grass or almost invisibly scratched
in foliage. He said he wished he as the artist could be completely removed from his paintings, yet he as the man keenly wanted them to be
understood and appreciated. He never wanted to be pigeonholed, and
played opposites against each other. He and his paintings had many
dualities: the detached invisible observer vs. the prankster and raconteur, Chadds Ford vs. Maine, free watercolors vs. meticulous temperas,
up-close precision vs. far-away bold forms, a dedicated brunette wifecurator-model vs. a dedicated blonde nurse-assistant-model, and mortality vs. vitality. Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? He’s chuckling, wherever,
and his remarkable legacy of paintings will tell the rest of the tale.
Elected 1967
Joyce Hill Stoner
Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg
Professor of Material Culture
Director
Preservation Studies Doctoral Program
University of Delaware
Paintings Conservator
Winterthur/UD Program in Art Conservation